Re: dual grub install?

[Jake Thomas]

I was originally thinking that our OP had two different bootable partitions to 
begin with (like a recovery partition and a loader partition, which are 
separate from the actual "drive C:" partition), and was thinking that orginally 
the script only looked for the loader paritition but has since been re-written 
to look for recovery partitions or whatever as well. (So that before there was 
only one entry and now there are two.)


Now John Page is saying that the "drive C:" paritition itself is bootable. Hmm. 
I didn't think it had a VBR bootloader. I thought you had to chainload the 
loader partition. Chainloading the "drive C:" partition could be a useful 
technique in recovering Windows as I mention in the other thread. Maybe the 
script has been re-written to detect the actual "drive C: partition" as well. 
That would explain having only one entry before and having two now.



Funny you bring up an anti-optical drive metality, Chris. My own dislike of 
optical discs is what brought me to Grub in the first place.

I hardly ever use optical discs. 
Bootable thumb drives/external USB drives all the way! Plus I use CDEmu 
in Linux to play my games in WINE without touching the CDs/DVDs.

Then when you find out about the 
magic of QEMU, that's a second death-blow to something you already 
killed. (you can make a real hard drive be -hda or -hdb in QEMU very 
easily: -hda /dev/sdb, but you'll need to run QEMU as root)


And I _think_ you can also do phony 
"emulation" of a CD drive by manipulating BIOS routines with grub4DOS, 
which works if you're booting into something that never talks to the CD 
drive, but rather always uses a BIOS routine to do that for it. Of 
course this must be on a BIOS machine, or at least have a BIOS loaded in 
memory. This method works for booting an iso of an Acronis true image 
CD, but Clonezilla is vastly superior, and that boots off USB easily. 
Besides, I'd prefer the QEMU technique anyways. I know that memdisk does 
pho-emulation of a floppy drive in the above fashion.



Cheers,
Jake