dual booting

[William Park]

> From: Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>

> To: tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org
> Sent: Fri, January 1, 2010 3:08:32 PM
> Subject: Re: [TLUG]: dual booting
> 
> On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 09:43:32PM -0800, William Park wrote:
> > This is one area where Windows/DOS does it right.  Bootloader in MBR just
> > looks for active partition, and boots from that partition.  So, install your Linux
> > boot loader in its own partition (say, /dev/sda2 or /dev/sdb1).  Of course,
> > Windows and Linux on separate harddisk is the easiest way.  You can then
> > choose which harddisk from BIOS boot menu.
> 
> Well does it work with GPT or only DOS style partition tables?
> 
> Swapping HD IDs from the BIOS can cause a serious mess.  I don't do that.

My motherboard is Asus M2N-E (fairly old one).  When I press <F8> during boot,
I get a list of devices to boot from (ie. harddisks, cdroms).  I did notice that
Ubuntu, OpenSUSE (may be Fedora) change the name and then order of devices.
But, Slackware and CentOS are predictable and familiar.

Right now, my boot "tree" goes something like this:
    /dev/sdb -- /dev/sdb1 -- Slackware64 (my main)
                                     -- /dev/sda (jump to second harddisk MBR)
                                     -- /dev/hda (jump to first harddisk MBR)

So, unattended boot ends up with Slackware64 on /dev/sdb1.  I can boot from
/dev/sda or /dev/hda, from LILO bootloader or from BIOS boot menu.  Key
insight is to have each harddisk or each partition be responsible for its own.

However, GRUB only works when I boot into that harddisk directly from BIOS.
LILO (Slackware is the only one using LILO) and Windows are more "tolerant";
I can boot them after 2 or 3 indirect steps.

> 
> I used to install the bootloader in the linux partition, but some
> filesystems don't seem to support that, and everything seems to default
> to the MBR these days so I gave up on it.  Also with DOS's fdisk it was
> easy to change the active partition back to the linux one, while with
> modern windows that is no longer a simple thing to do.

Same here.  I just give the whole harddisk to Windows, and let it do whatever
to it.  The same for Linux.  Harddisks are cheap, especially if you don't throw
way old disks.

--William



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