Re: Booting straight into various Windows options from grub

In <j1rri4-qiv.ln1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Martin Gregorie <martin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Tony Houghton wrote:
I'm sure I read an article in a Linux magazine years ago which explained
how you could use a Linux bootloader (I expect it was just lilo in those
days, but if it's possible with lilo it should be possible with grub
too) to boot straight into different Windows options instead of having
to press F8 at the right moment to bring up Windows' boot menu after
lilo/grub. Eg if you have different versions of Windows installed or you
want to select Safe Mode etc. I've never been able to find that article
again though.

Does anyone know if that's possible, or must I have been dreaming?

Booting different versions of 'doze is straight forward as far as GRUB
is concerned - just add extra menu item definitions as you would for
different Linux versions. "info grub" tells all.

Caveat: what follows is something I last did when upgrading from Win
3.11 to Win 95. back in '96 - thinks may have changed since then in the
MS world. Here's the situation at that time:

What I'm specifically trying to do is choose between Vista and XP. I
think the NT series is more conducive to multi-booting than the
DOS-based horrors, but OTOH doing it without resorting to nasty
low-level bodges like hiding different versions of Windows from each
other and swapping drives in the BIOS may make it harder to get
something as simple as a bootloader to be able to manipulate it for you.

Installing different versions of 'doze is not straight forward because
Windows can only be installed in a primary partition. The catch is the
Windows partitioning program. 'fdisk' only permits one active partition
per disk and refuses point blank to create an active primary partition
if there's one on any other disk that's visible to the BIOS. I suspect
that the same applies to the installer, which may get confused or accuse
you of piracy if it sees more than one disk with an active primary
partition.

Ah, that's probably why I've had a few "complications". I already had
Vista installed and added XP to a spare logical partition. XP installed
without complaining, but put some of its system files ended up in the
primary partiton (C: used by Vista) and it stopped Vista from being
bootable even when I tried adding it to boot.ini. I was able to repair
Vista (which, interestingly, didn't replace grub in the MBR which I had
already restored) and get it to be able to boot XP by using something
called BCDEdit (Vista doesn't use boot.ini any more).

Looks like I'm lucky to have got this far and there's not much chance of
being able to do away with a second menu for booting Windows!

It can be done, but you need to put each primary partition on a
different disk and make sure that all other disks containing active
primary partitions are unplugged while you partition and format the next
disk and install Windows on it. As far as MS is concerned this is an
undocumented process. I did the above after considerable frustration:
took out the Win 3.11 disk while I installed '95 on a new disk. When
that was complete I could insert the original disk as IDE slave (the '95
disk was master). The PC then booted into '95 (no option to boot into
3.11 was offered) and pull stuff across from the old disk before finally
removing it.

A straight dual boot (Linux + 'doze) PC is much easier to set up
provided you install Windows first.

Luckily I've got a dab hand at restoring grub using a rescue disc for
those more difficult situations where you install/upgrade Windows after
Linux :). Once you get to know grub a bit that's easier to do than with
lilo.

--
TH * http://www.realh.co.uk
.

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