remote control of dual boot

[Mostafa Z. Afgani]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Paul Howarth wrote:
| Jacques Dimanche wrote:
|
|> Stewart Nelson wrote:
|>
|>> I have a conventional dual-boot system:
|>> Win XP on IDE primary master, grub in MBR,
|>> FC2 on primary slave.
|>>
|>> If either Windows or FC2 is running, I can
|>> access it with VNC.  Of course, a reboot will
|>> switch to the default OS, if the other is running.
|>> However, I don't know how to switch back.
|>>
|>> Is there a good way to boot FC2 from Windows?
|>> Or to boot Windows from FC2?
|>
|>
|> Here is how I would do it.  I would make my linux be the default OS to
|> boot into.  You mentioned that you can control both OS'es remotely so
|> this shouldn't be a problem.  If you are in windows, then you can just
|> reboot to boot into linux.  While in linux, you can reboot into
|> windows by executing the following commands:
|>
|> enter grub with:
|>    grub --no-floppy (don't probe floppy drives makes it go faster if
|> you do not have a drive like all my machines)
|> in the grub command line:
|>    savedefault --default=2 --once    (replace 2 with the appropriate
|> selection that is your windows option in grub.conf)
|>    quit
|> Then you can reboot and it will boot into Windows.  When you reboot
|> again, it will go back into Linux.
|
|
| The way I do it is to have the XP bootloader in the MBR, and have it
| chain-load grub to boot Linux. The first partition on the first disk is
| a small FAT partition that contains XP's boot.ini file. By manipulating
| this file (which, since it's on a filesystem that can be both read and
| written from both XP and Linux, can be done from either OS), I can
| choose which OS to boot by default and hence, what will get booted if I
| just reboot.
|
| The key to this is having a bootloader configuration file on a
| filesystem that can be written by all OSes in use. In my case I'm OK
| because I have a FAT partition at the start of the disk, because I
| partitioned the disk with this in mind. An alternative approach might be
| to use ext2fsd (http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/), an ext2 filesystem
| driver for Windows, which could allow you to modify grub.conf from
Windows.
|
| Paul.
|
Hello Paul,

I haven't checked, but I thought ext2fsd didn't allow you to write to
ext3 volumes.

Best,
- -M
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (MingW32)

iD8DBQFBnLZp14B2Pwzes+4RAjqrAJsFK5+rBoHGKFKbmZCu8CfVHTwPwQCeNirx
xIKMuqJlzm+BC9bexmlkzwA=
=iFpK
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----