Can Grub 2.0 be installed on a Windows machine or laptop as a stand alone bootloader minus a Linux distribution ? Can Grub be installed on any Windows Machine example Vista, Windows 7, 8 or 10 - by itself ? I have read that this is not possible -

Maybe you can chainload the win OS.

GRUB manual:

https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html

See 4.1.2 chainloading / 4.3.3 Dos Windows

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tomemick thank you for your input - you are absolutely correct. It's kind of misleading when they say that Grub is a universal bootloader when in fact it is not set up to work with Windows the way it is to work with other Linux and or Unix OS's

Rubbish. The Microsoft loaders are not multi-boot compliant. Like everything else M$oft do, they use proprietary methods. The fault is not grubs - we, as a community, have to develop work-arounds because of M$ofts intransigence.

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@Syg00 I wonder has the situation changed with Windows 10 Professional edition -

There is no mention of "Dual boot", only Windows.
Which brings one to ask, why this question is being asked?

Windows boot loader does a great job of booting Windows, if you don't like it, get rid of Windows.
Why would anyone even consider using a non Windows boot loader to load Windows?

If errors cause the loader to fail, it's a problem with Windows, not the boot loader, simply go to restore feature and refresh or reset it, or use the recovery media you created after purchasing/acquiring your Windows 10 machine.
It's simple and works great.

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You may be running a Windows machine with a high capacity HDD and decide you want to partition the HDD to run other operating systems such as Debian, Mint, Fedora, FreeBSD etc, etc..for that you need the ability to boot into any one of those Os'es. What's more you may decide to attach an external HDD partitioned to run other Os'es to your native machine. In such cases you need a bootloader that permits multibooting and Grub is designed for that -

i think this is rather getting worse with every new MS software version. including windows of course.

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It can certainly be installed on a machine with just windows in the same way as a separate boot partition. You could easily create a small grub partition with a Linux filesystem or possibly vfat and install Grub to the MBR of the drive pointing to that partition.

The problems you will have with this is that you will need to manually create the grub.cfg file. The reasons for this are that the scripts necessary to create the grub.cfg file (grub-mkconfig or the Ubuntu update-grub) are located in /usr/sbin which would be on the Linux system. Also, there are a number of other Grub files in the /etc/grub.d directory as well as the /etc/default/grub file. So basically, if you can create the grub.cfg file manually, it should not be a problem. Since the installation of the Grub bootloader when installing a Linux system is usually the last step, you will need to find aother way to install Grub. See the link below.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Gr...iveCD_terminal

Grub2 doesn't actually 'boot' any windows directly but rather chainloads the other OS. An explanation of chainloading is at the Grub Manual site at the link posted above and the suggestion above to chainload seems like the simplest solution. Just install the Grub files to the partition and then create chainload entries for as many partitions as you want.

If you are using UEFI, that adds another layer of complexity as you will need an EFI partition if you don't already have one in addition to the Grub partition.

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