Saturday 21 August 2010

Link Grub legacy to Grub 2

I'm a big fan of trying out Linux distros, as a result I've had my own custom Grub (Legacy) menu for quite a while so that I do not have to continually edit the distro's own version. Recently Ubuntu and some of the Ubuntu based distros have started using Grub2; this can be a bit of a pain as it, by default, tries to wipe whatever is on the MBR and replace it with Grub2. A big NO in my opinion; Linux is all about freedom. I always install the distro's Grub to the partition where the distro itself is going.

After a while of going through various ways of working around this I was started going through the net to find a simple, universal command to chain load from Grub Legacy into Grub2. This does exist, however I really did have to look hard to find it and so far it has not let me down. Simply enter this into the menu.lst file (this is located in /boot/grub/):

title Grub2
root (hdx,y)
kernel /boot/grub/core.img

You will need to replace x and y with the appropriate position of your Grub2 menu, x is the disk and y is the partition number. So for my specific computer I use root (hd0,5) the first hard drive (0) and the sixth partition (5) remember that Grub Legacy starts counting at 0.

I hope that this post will save some others the unnecessary trawling that I had to endure for such a simple task.

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