Grub and two distros

Anne Wilson annew at kde.org
Sat Jan 10 09:54:35 UTC 2009


On Saturday 10 January 2009 04:54:44 Craig White wrote:
> On Sat, 2009-01-10 at 15:10 +1030, Tim wrote:
> > On Fri, 2009-01-09 at 13:10 -0700, Craig White wrote:
> > > google this...
> > >
> > > site:www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list F8/F9 Multiboot question
> >
> > Or, since chainloading is used to do that sort of thing, I'd use
> > chainload as a search keyword.
>
> ----
> the thread of course was 'F8/F9 Multiboot question'
>
> It was a specific answer
>
I've read everything I can, including the thread mentioned above, and I'm 
still not happy.  I think it's a complete lack of understanding of the boot 
process.  I have always installed grub to the MBR, and thought that this 
simply called up menu.lst, read the stanzas there and proceeded to carry out 
the selected stanza.  Now it seems that things are not that simple, so I have 
to ask you to return to absolute basics.

It seems that I should install grub into the root partition for the particular 
distro - correct?

If the other distro is not automatically added I then will need to manually 
edit menu.lst to add a stanza for the other distro - correct?

I presume that I will also have to manually edit the menu.lst on the other 
distro?

Exactly how does either of these get called?  IOW, what tells it which one to 
call?

Then there's the matter of kernel updates.  Fedora has a default number for 
keeping kernels - how will it know to only handle its own kernels and kernel 
entries in menu.lst?  And if it doesn't, will I have to manually edit menu.lst 
every time there is a kernel update (having made a routine of backing up 
menu.lst)?

The example I downloaded, which concerned a RHLinux install and a Mandrake 
one, only used chainloader for the floppy stanza.  I know it gets used for a 
Windows stanza.  Does that mean that it doesn't get used for two Linux 
distros?

I think that most of my questions covered.  Maybe I'll feel more confident 
when I understand these issues better :-)
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