Saving Fedora when installing Windows?

[Timothy Murphy]

Chris Murphy wrote:

>> I want to upgrade Windows XP on my laptop to Windows 7,
>> but I'd like to be sure that I can get back to Linux afterwards.
>> (I'm sure Windows installation will over-write the MBR.)
 
> Which version of Fedora?

I'm running Fedora-20/KDE.
 
>> One thing I tried without success in the past
>> was to specify a USB stick when running grub2-install.

> Sure, and then at the grub prompt you can use ls to find the designation
> for the drive and partition, then use configfile
> (hdx,msdosy)/grub2/grub.cfg which will produce the grub menu and let you
> boot. Then you can reinstall grub to the hard drive once booted.

Last time I tried this I didn't get a grub prompt
when re-starting the machine with the USB stick in.

Is that what you are suggesting?
As far as I could see, the MBR written on the USB stick
did not contain the required information to start the grub2 loader.

What grub2-install command, precisely, did (or would) you give?

> Or you can just do this from Live Desktop written to a USB stick.

I did try installing Fedora KDE Live CD on the stick -
is that what you are suggesting? -
but I found the grub version that ran on the stick (presumably grub2)
was not the best - 
it didn't seem possible to use it interactively.

Possibly my experience is due to my ignorance of grub2 usage.
But I also tried using a CentOS Live USB stick,
and had no better luck.


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland