Saving the MBR by "dd"?

James Wilkinson ubuntu at westexe.demon.co.uk
Tue May 17 12:13:41 UTC 2005


Peter Baumgartner wrote:
> That´s worth a discussion, because copy/pasting the ubuntu part of the 
> "ubuntu" /boot/grub/ menu.list into the "FC3" one is sufficient to boot 
> all three os´es without Problems. "speaking to each other" of  OS´es is 
> another thing ;-)

Well, there's problems and ... other sorts of problems. You're quite
right that you can make a grub menu.lst that can boot Fedora and Ubuntu
directly, based on either OS's menu.lst.

But if you're manually copying kernel files around, then you're working
outside the packaging system. If you update the Ubuntu kernel through
apt-get, you can't expect a Fedora grub to notice it.

I much prefer something like:
title Other Linux
    rootnoverify (hd1,5)
    chainloader +1
and installing the grub loader to /'s (or /boot's) bootsector. That way
yum, up2date and/or apt-get can all Do Their Own Things and update the
Right Places without you having to remember to copy kernels about.

This is important, because the kernel does have occasional security
updates, and you want to be sure the latest problems are fixed.

James.

-- 
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