How to find out where grub is installed?

[Tim]

On Sat, 2009-01-17 at 20:30 +0100, Andras Simon wrote:
> I have F7 (and an unused XP) installed and I'd like to install
> F10 without bothering F7. I have separate partitions for boot,
> root, usr that I left empty for just this purpose when I installed
> F7. From the recent "Grub and two distros" thread I
> understand (or so I hope) that a good method to proceed is to
> have grub installed in the respective Fedora versions' boot partitions,
> and, additionally, in the drive's MBR, which will chainload these.
> 
> My first question is: how do I find out whether the present grub
> is installed in the MBR or not. I'm guessing it's not, but how do
> I find out?

How does your system currently boot?  If it goes through a GRUB menu to
boot either windows or Linux, then it is.  If so, you don't need to
change it.

Run your install for Fedora 10, and tell it to install the GRUB
bootloader into the new Fedora 10 boot partition.  That'll leave the
existing bootloader alone.

Now, after that's run its course, add an entry to your older Fedora 7
grub.conf file to chainload the new partition.  After you've done this
the boot sequence will be thus:  The system will boot up the same as it
used to, with a GRUB menu for windows or your Fedora 7 installation,
plus an option for your new Fedora 10.  If you pick Fedora 10, it'll
chainload over to Fedora 10's bootloader, and 10's GRUB menu, and you'll
have a choice about which kernel to boot Fedora 10 with.

> 
>    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/sda1   *           1        1275    10241406    7  HPFS/NTFS
> /dev/sda2            1276        1288      104422+  83  Linux
> /dev/sda3            1289        1301      104422+  83  Linux
>
> sda2 is F7's boot partition, sda3 will hopefully be F10's.

Going by the above information, the chainloader details for Fedora 10
would be:

title Fedora 10
        rootnoverify (hd0,2)
        chainloader +1

You'd have a similar entry for your Windows boot, but something other
than ",2" inside the rootnoverify command.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.9-73.fc9.i686

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