Boot from CD -- sort of?
 

Hey guys and girls,
Haven't been here in almost a year, and I have a (unique?) question....

I've had some bad experiences dual booting, which only happen once i run the commands to fix the boot record after I remove Linux for some reason or another. ( I run Windows XP SP2, which HATES having the MBR modified it seems)

I'm wondering if there's a way to have Linux installed on my machine, minus boot loader, and to configure a CD so that when it is loaded at startup, boom, it goes right into the distro of my choice, but when the CD's not inserted, it goes straight to Windows.

I've looked at things like Knoppix, but I don't want everything to remain on CD, I want linux on a partition on my hard drive, I just want to avoid having GRUB or LILO issues, and to only have linux boot up when the "boot CD", as it were, is inserted.

For the record, distros I have tried:

Mandrake Linux, Slackware, RedHat, FC6 & 7, Kubuntu, OpenSUSE (Almost installed it, but balked when it came time to partition the hard drive and install the boot loader, thus my posting here :))

Thanks for any help!
plinko

First, there is no reason not to put GRUB in the MBR. Setting up GRUB to boot Windows XP is not an issue.
It is good to have a Windows CD to recover the Windows bootloader, if necessary. (But there are other workarounds)

You can certainly put GRUB on a floppy and set the timeout such that it goes to the default system with almost no hesitation.

Also take a look at a new thing called "super grub"

You can also use dd to make a "recovery disk" for linux that basically just boots it right up to the partition you want when you boot from the floppy (cd, etc). There are plenty of tutorials online on how to do this (google around).

You can even use Windows Boot loader to boot linux. You simply have to edit the boot.ini file on C: and make sure it can access the linux boot file created using dd. In fact, at one time as a joke I used lilo and the windows boot loader and this allowed me to continually switch between the two in a circular fashion.

The SuperGRUB looks awesome, thanks!

Very cool. Thanks for your help!