Ubuntu

Install GRUB for Windows ONLY

Asked by Dave B

Okay, here's the deal. I "built" a PC from Garage Sale parts, I.E. PC's cannibalized and put back together into a complete functional unit. The tower was an Engineer's workstation (5 HDD bays, 5 CD/expansion bays, 2 cooling fans, 300 watt PSU w/fan also), an old Gateway motherboard with a Slot 1 P3 CPU (450 Mhz), 256Mb SDRAM, a 64 Mb AGP Video Card, Soundblaster Audio Card, a CD Burner & a DVD Rom.

I also somehow managed to install 2 hard drives and they managed to magically configure themselves to the hardware they found themselves attached to and boot up. One is a 4 Gb with Windows 2000 Pro, the other is a 6 gb with Windows Me. Both have enough software to be worthy of saving, Win Me has a lot of classic games installed (Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Asteroids, Battlezone, Galaga, Defender, Etc... a lot of the old console classics from back in the 80's), and Win 2k is full featured with Office 97 Pro, Adobe Photoshop 6, Quicken 2000, and a lot of Palm Utilities.

Now both hard drives, when booted claim to be C: Drive. With one tagged as Slave, the other will read and access the other, as both are formatted as FAT32. But although 2K can run a few of the programs from Me, Me won't run hardly anything from 2K, not even the screen savers.

What I want is to be able to Dual Boot, like I can from my Home Office desktop (Kubuntu 6.06 & Win XP Pro). I tried to edit the 2K boot.ini file to give me access to the second hard drive boot, but no dice. I guess I don't know enough to do that. At present, if I want to boot Me, I have to open the case, swap the cables and reset the jumper pins. Bios has no provisions to boot the 2nd hard drive like nearly every other PC in our home can from F8ing at boot, it's too old. I have a Ubuntu 6.06 LiveCD (it doesn't like the P3, takes 20 minutes to load up then locks up, not enough RAM I guess). Is there any way to write a grub and install it to floppy so I can dual boot? I'd rather not mess too much with the MBR. I've been doing some research on the web googling "Dual Boot" & "Grub", but with little luck. Nearly everything about the subject either pertains to MS/Linux, or installing the OS's in a speciffic order. Seems that if I want Dual Boot Windows, I need the Install CD's. I like the drives as they are, no sense installing the OS over again, and besides, I don't have a 2k install disc even if I wanted to, which from what I have discovered is the LAST to install.

Please help me!

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marcobra (Marco Braida) (marcobra) said : 		#1

Some for you, take look at supergrub:

http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/SuperGrubDiskPage.html

"Super Grub Disk helps Windows users who want to use GRUB as their boot manager. GRUB is actually a much better for managing multiple boot Windows arrangements than Windows' own bootloader. A few Windows users who are clever enough like to add a Linux distro that contains GRUB just for this purpose. So, Super Grub Disk also has functions even to help those who are installing more than one Windows or who have Windows installed in a non-first partition or hard disk."

HTH

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Wrwrwr (wrwrwr) said : 		#2

Maybe a bios update would be good for your system. Also the boot order is not always under F8, often it's found inside the main bios configuration, but sometimes there is simply some other key.

Using a floppy, yes why not, as far as you can boot from a floppy ;) You would grub-install /dev/fd0, and edit your menu.lst properly. If you'd like to put it on the main drive, you'll also need a small partition for /boot.

However i would try with some ready tools, like super grub disk: http://geocities.com/supergrubdisk/, or one of the many other similar.

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Dave B (d-s-breen) said : 		#3

Problem with Super Grub and the tutorials is that it implies that linux is already installed, which is not the case. Ubuntu LiveCD locks up the processor, it's just an old Pentium 3, with only 256 of ram and a 100Mhz FSB it won't boot from the LiveCD. What I need is either a utility that will create me a floppy grub that provides me with a choice upon boot, or someone to walk me through it. Will I need to reboot into Ubuntu on my Office PC in order to create a grub on a floppy?

Again, I have 2 hard drives each with a separate version of windows on it. There are no partitions on either drive. The Bios on this machine only provides me with the boot order of floppy, CD, or hard drive. It recognizes there are 2 hard drives, but there is no option of booting from the 2nd (slave) hard drive. I checked, there are no newer bios for that motherboard.

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Wrwrwr (wrwrwr) said : 		#4

There is a tutorial on burning super grub iso on a cd from windows. But you can use your office pc, or any pc that can boot from the live cd to create a floppy, like here: http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/SuperGrubDiskPage.html#How_Make_your_Super_Grub_Floppy_Disk

I'll try to explain it in more details for an ubuntu desktop:
- download one of the floppy images here: http://forjamari.linex.org/frs/?group_id=61&release_id=502 to your Desktop
- insert a floppy
- open a terminal (at applications-->accessories), and paste in it:
cd Desktop
dd if=super_grub_disk_english_floppy_0.9654.img of=/dev/fd0
change the name of the image if you downloaded another one.

After that you should be able to boot from the floppy and select the system through boot & tools menu.

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Wrwrwr (wrwrwr) said : 		#5

By the way, this lockup may not be so fatal, Pentium III with with 256mb is enough to more or less comfortably use xubuntu desktop. The installation may be a bit troublesome due to low ram however. I would recommend the alternate cd normally (it only has a text installer, no live system).

If this locks like this:

configuring network interfaces
[17179264.748000] BUG: soft lockup detected on CPU#0

then try removing your network card.

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