O-P when I install gnome onto sdb and I get a prompt of where to install the bootloader I have an option to install it to sda or sdb. Can I install it to sda and have both KDE and Gnome show up on my start up screen and get a choice as to which one to boot to? I want the KDE install on sda to be the default, which is the 250 gig drive and it is set in the bios as the first boot. Thanks.
A simple rule. I always install the master grub to the drive on which the installation lives. I define master grub as the one belonging to the
first Linux installation on that drive, and the one whose
menu.lst will control the boot menu. For all other installations on the same drive, I install grub to the / partition of the installation. One can either
chainload the newer installations, or
copy/paste the
first stanza of that menu.lst to the
master menu.lst to boot directly.
With a
second hard drive, I still install the grub from the first Linux installation
on that drive to the MBR of
that drive. Should the first drive
fail, or be
removed, the second can become the
boot drive, and be
fully functional immediately. That being done, I copy the
first stanza of each Linux installations menu.lst to the
master menu.lst on the
first drive, and change each reference to
(hd0,n) to
(hd1,n). If a third drive is installed, and has a Linux installation, the same applies, except any reference to
(hd0,n) in the stanza copied to the master menu.lst is edited to read
(hd2,n).
If you install the grub from your Gnome installation on
sdb, to the MBR of
sda, it becomes the master grub, and if either drive fails, no OS is bootable, because half of the master grub will be missing. Better to install the Gnome grub to the
sdb MBR and change the
boot drive to
sdb in
BIOS, if you have a reason to want that grub to be the master.
The more hard drives one has, the more complicated this gets to keep each drive independent, and yet able to boot any installation on the machine, from any drive set to be the boot drive. I currently have four drives connected to this machine, and all have Linux installations on them. To simplify the process, I rely on boot partitions.
I have a boot partition on each of my drives. In it are copies of the
/boot directories of each installation,
renamed for the appropriate installation; ie
minime2010, kde2010, openbox, fullmonty, etc. By doing this, whichever hard drive is the boot drive, the kernels for each installation will be available at
(hd0,0)/<whatever>/vmlinuz. Replace
<whatever> with one of the renamed /boot directory names. I also have each partition
labeled, so the
same boot stanzas can be used from
any drive.
Example:title MiniMe 2010
kernel (hd0,0)/minime2010/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=MiniMe_2010 root=LABEL=minime2010 resume=LABEL=swap1000 vga=791
initrd (hd0,0)/minime2010/initrd.img
title PCLOS-KDE-2010
kernel (hd0,0)/kde2010/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=PCLOS-KDE-2010 root=LABEL=kde2010 resume=LABEL=swap1000 vga=791
initrd (hd0,0)/kde2010/initrd.img
title Full-Monty
kernel (hd0,0)/fullmonty/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=Full-Monty root=LABEL=fullmonty acpi=on resume=swap1000 vga=791
initrd (hd0,0)/fullmonty/initrd.imgIn the three examples above, my
internal drive
/dev/sda is the
boot drive, and each of these installations are on an
external USB drive,
/dev/sdc. I an currently using an old 2002 machine that
cannot boot from anything
except /dev/sda.
No USB boot at all; yet with this method I am currently running the
MiniMe installation on the
USB drive. If I move the USB drive to another computer that
can boot from a USB drive, the
same renamed /boot directories are in its
boot partition, so the
same boot stanzas still work from its
master menu.lst.
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