Getting a Common

[Donald Darden]

I now have two versions of Linux installed on my PC, along with several installs of Windows.  The Windows installs currently occupy 3 of the four partitions on my first hard drive, and the Linux distributions occupy the first two partitions of my second hard drive.  The second hard drive also has an NTFS partition and a Swap partition.

In installing Knoppix initially, I put it in the first partition on the second hard drive.  Later, I reformatted the drive to make room for another Linux partition, and the easiest way to do that was with Windows' Disk Manager (under Administrator Tools).  What I did was backup my NTFS partition's contents to an external drive, then used the Disk Manager to remove all the partitions, then created four new ones, each sized according to my needs.  The only one I did a quick format of the three to be used for Linux, just specifying that I wanted no path or drive letter assiened to any, then performed a full NTFS format on the one to receive the contents from the backup.  I had that partition assigned a path and drive letter for Windows.  Then I restored the contents.

Of course I had to install Ubuntu and Knoppix, the two distributions I picked, from scratch.  I found that if I installed a distribution to the first partition on a hard drive, that NTLDR, the Windows Boot Loader, had no trouble finding it, assuming that I used BootPart to update the Boot.ini file.  But apparently NTLDR follows the Microsoft tradition of not supporting non-Microsoft file system formats, becazuse it will only work on either the first boot sector on the hard drive, or with a Microsoft-compatable partition.  So I was forced to think about replacing NTLDR with GRUB, the recommended multi-boot loader for Linux.

Only I haven't yet gotten a good handle on what GRUB requires.  So first I looked at the way that Knoppix had set it up on a floppy disk.  There is /boot folder, and in that, a /boot/grub folder.  And looking at the files there with an editor, I found that manu.lst has the information displayed during the boot selection process.  In fact, it apeared that changes could be made to menu.lst that would change the behavior of the boot process.  I felt comfortable enough to attempt some changes in menu.lst, and they did indeed change the boot selection process.

Now Knoppix had worked fine from the NTLDR when it was installed in the first partition, but would only boot from the floppy when reinstalled in the second partition.  But the boot file that I used with NTLDR worked without any changes when I replaced Knoppix with Ubuntu on the first partition,  In other words, NTLDR was able to load any Linux distribution if it were installed in the first partition without any changes to Boot.ini.  But at present, I could only get to Knoppix in the second partition by booting from the floppy.

What I did then was to find the pertinent portions of the menu.lst file on the floppy and cut and paste them into the menu;lst file that I found under /boot/grup on the first partition - which is the boot process for Ubuntu.  But with the paste process, it also became the boot process for Knoppix.  The only problem was to log in as Super User so that I could edit and modify the menu.lst file on the first partition.

So now I have a two step boot process.  The first allows me to select any Windows boot, or go to the second boot method to choose which Linux version to boot instead.