Installing grub to dual boot

[Michael Hipp]

Collins Richey wrote:
> On 6/10/05, Michael Hipp <Michael at hipp.com> wrote:
> 
>>The deprecation of grub-install is news to me also. Wonder what replaces
>>it? It always "just worked" for me.
>>
> 
> 
> If I remember correctly, grub-install was deprecated almost as soon as
> it was created. The manual approach always works. Here's a brief
> intro. I'm assuming you have Windows on hda1 and Linux on hda2 with no
> /boot partition, otherwise the numbers below will have to be changed.
> 
> 1) I presume that your distro did the correct thing and installed the
> required grub boot stage...  modules and a grub.conf (or menu.lst) in
> /boot/grub.
> 
> 2) boot from something useful like Knoppix and mount (remount as rw)
> your Linux partition (hda2) on /mnt/something. Verify that
> /boot/grub/grub.conf (or menu.lst) has the correct stanzas to boot
> Windows (hda1 or grub (hd0,0)) and Linux (hda2 or grub (hd0,1)).
> 
> 3) chroot /mnt/something /bin/bash
> 
> 4) grub
> 
>      root (hd0,1)             <== this is hda2, partition where grub can find
>                                              /boot/grub
>     setup (hd0)               <== disk drive (hda) where MBR will be written
> 
>     quit
> 
> 5) exit from chroot; unmount /mnt/something; reboot and enjoy.
> 
> Those depressingly few lines in 4) are all that grub-install
> accomplishes, when it actually works.

Yes. But I have no recollection of grub-install ever failing on me. Maybe I've 
just been lucky. Course, I've almost used it from the running system, rather 
than one that has been chroot'ed into. That's why I always made boot floppies 
to avoid such.

The steps above aren't particularly a problem, but having something like 
grub-install available to hold one's hand while doing a quick job of reloading 
the MBR seems to me like a very correct approach.

Michael