Triple boot - Ubuntu Feisty (7.04) Dapper (6.06) and Windows XP (P4)

[Eric Dunbar]

On 25/03/07, Loïc Martin <loic.martin3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Eric Dunbar wrote :
>
> > Hi Loic, I figured that grub could do it but I wasn't sure how.
> >
> > How do you set up your machine to have four different installs?
> >
> > One thread I found suggested having a grub installed on the /boot for
> > each install and then installing a grub into the MBR that redirects to
> > the grub for each install. This is ideally what I would like to have
> > (that way it avoids problems with automatic updates interfering with
> > the menu.lst file).
> >
> > I'm not sure how I tell grub to install into the mbr and to make sure
> > it installs the relevant binary into each install.
> >
> > I presume that currently I have only _one_ instance of the grub binary
> > on my machine in the mbr (of the 250 GB HD... the first (sda) HD) that
> > points to the /boot/grub/menu.lst of the Ubuntu 7.04 install??
> >
> > Anyway, I'm going to play with supergrub and see if I can get
> > temporary access to the other partition. After that I'll see if I can
> > do a two-stage grub set-up.
> >
> > Eric.
> >
>
> Actually, I just never cared to have a more secure solution. Default
> Ubuntu install picks up whatever kernels you have on whatever
> partitions, as long as they're at the right place (never tried if it
> would pick up other distros' kernels).

Hmm. I suspect that's what's going on. My 606 /boot is on its own
partition which means that an installer wouldn't be able to handle it
;-).

> When I moved partitions around, I used to fire up a Breezy desktop
> install (Dapper and Edgy's partition tool failed on my system when
> resizing/swapping) then abort just before install actually starts. It
> just automagically recreates the right entries for grub.
>
> I only used to tinker with menu.lst with pre-Feisty Ubuntu installs,
> that used to pick up every kernel, then added a /single user, /memtest
> *and* worse a "start this kernel on that other partition, then same
> kernel on whatever partition you ended up having :X). So I had to clean
> up after each install.
>
> Feisty is far saner in that regard, so I've forgotten the actual grub
> syntax, but it's easy to solve with man grub-install.

<shudder> grub man and info (it's nothing more than a copy of man?)
pages seem to be a bit skimpy on details. I've been playing with
supergrub and learning a lot by simply experimenting. I'm still not
clear on how to set grub with grub-install ... that's a project for
another day.