On Sun, Apr 6, 2014 at 1:22 AM, Richard Owlett <rowl...@cloud85.net> wrote: > Tom H wrote: >> >> Let's assume that you have two Linux installations on sda, on sda1 and >> sda2, and that grub is embedded in the mbr of sda for sda1 and in the >> pbr/vbr of sda2 for sda2. > > I have two distinct use cases > 1. one machine has multiple Debian installs {primary and logical > partitions} > 2. one machine has WinXP on sda1 with multiple Debian installs on both > primary and logical partitions with several logical partitions > formatted > as NTFS > > 1. I have no idea what "pbr/vbr" means > 2. I've not yet Googled 'chainloading of boot loaders' >> >> If it's sda1's grub to which the bios hands over the boot process, >> you'll be booting the installation on sda2 with one of these three, >> "linux (hd0,msdos2)/boot/vmlinuz...", "configfile >> (hd0,msdos2)/boot/grub/grub.cfg", "multiboot >> (hd0,msdos2)/boot/grub/i386-pc/core.img", and none of them can be >> affected by the block list issue. > > My machine with only Debian *appears* well behaved. > My machine with both Windows and Debian gives me fits.
pbr/vbr is partition boot record/volume boot record (I don't know which of them is more accurate/appropriate) and they refer to the boot record of a partition as opposed to the boot record of a disk, the mbr. I'm replying to you after 2-3 weeks so you might already have gogoled chainloading but just in case: If you're chainloading Linux, then the simplest way is to use one of the above three methods. If you're chainloading Windows, then you have to use "set root=(hd0,1) ; chainloader +1"; and you can use "drivemap..." or "parttool..." if you need to fool the Windows bootloader into thinking that it's on the first disk or the first partition respectively. I haven't dual-booted Windows and Linux for a while, but I have, in the past, when using Windows bootloader rather than grub to boot WIndows, dd'd the Linux vbr to a file on "c:\" and created a "c:\boot.ini" entry for Linux. With more recent versions of Windows you'd have to use bcdedit to add a Linux entry but I've never done so, FTR, if/when you upgrade your box(es), you should get EFI because it makes dual-,triple-, ...-booting far simpler. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/CAOdo=sxkst0tu2wp61-m1gc+6+hbnwn0nwyo6vdgeeo3bvs...@mail.gmail.com