Configuring grub questions

[Alex]

Hi,

On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 3:55 PM, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote:
>
> On Jan 26, 2014, at 3:13 PM, Alex <mysqlstudent at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have an old computer with two disks. One is a F18 system and the
>> other is a Win7 system. Both disks were installed and configured as
>> primary. I've been shutting down the system and switching the IDE
>> cables depending on which one I'd like to have booted.
>
> You should be able to choose the drive with BIOS setup rather than physically switching cables.

As it turned out, I was able to do this since one disk is PIDE and the
other is SATA and Linux is much more resilient with booting than
Windows.

>> How can I configure the grub on the F18 system so I can control which
>> system I'd like to load at boot time?
>
> Well that's a rabbit hole but what you can try for starters is to mount the Windows volume (open question as to which one, I'm mainly used to single partition Windows installs, but if you install to an unpartitioned drive, the default behavior of the Windows installer creates a sort of boot partition that's small, and a main one); and then simply do:
>
> grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
>
> By default mkconfig uses os-prober and ought to find Windows without it being mounted but it might help it find it
> easier if it is mounted. If it's encrypted, with TrueCrypt or Bit Locker then I have no ideas whether it's possible.

Thanks for your help. This is exactly what I did. I'm not a Linux
newbie - just didn't realize grub had advanced as far as it has in
recent years. Much of the research I did with grub prior to posting
turned out to be wrong and unrelated.

> Yes you tell BIOS setup you want to boot from the secondary disk. And then it will always load GRUB.

Six of one... I had only set it up a few days ago, so there wasn't all
that much switching, actually.

>> I'm not sure how Win7 would respond to booting as a secondary disk
>> when the install was done as primary...
>
> I don't think it'll care.

I meant slave, which probably would have been a problem, but you're
right - it didn't care just as secondary when controlling it through
the BIOS.

Thanks for your help.
Alex