grub.conf and boot.ini
 

Hey there. I'm on Gentoo Linux 1.4 and have it successfully installed and all, and have gotten my boot loader to work almost perfectly. (but since I'm posting, it must be obvious that it ain't perfect enough...)

Here is my configuration:

3 hard drives. One, the primary master with the grub boot record, is the drive that is housing Linux. 2 is a FAT32 drive primarily for sharing files between linux and windows. 3 is a 2 partition drive split down the middle with WIndows 2k in the first and Windows XP in the second partitions, both NTFS.

Now at the time I have my grub.conf written such that I can choose between either booting to Linux or booting to the Windows drive, which then brings up the NT Boot Loader that has a menu to choose between windows 2k and XP. This is okay, but I'd like (if it's possible) to have 2k and XP to boot from the grub loader and just skip the nt loader menu...

Basically there must be a way for me to edit the contents of ONLY the windows drive to make it to where I can choose which partition to boot from. When I installed it, I made sure all other drives were disconnected so that it would not edit the Linux boot record. ALso, if it helps, the windows boot menu is controlled from the WIndows 2k partition (as that is the one with the boot.ini). So my grub.conf is similar to this:

#Gentoo Linux Loader:
root (hd0,0)
boot (hd0,0)/bzImage

#Windows Loader
rootnoverify (hd2,0)
map (0x82) (0x80)
map (0x80) (0x82)
chainloader +1


The map ... stuff being for making the windows drive THINK that it is in the primary drive location. This question pretty much comes down to is there a way to get rid of NT loader altogether and JUST use grub. THanks in advance...

I have done set up a machine to use only the grub even with W2k, XP and Server 2000 installed. It does take a bit of fiddling around so take it or leave it. :)
The problem is that Windows wants to be on the " C: " partition which is usually the first primary drive. It always dumps some important files onto that partition and needs to have access to them.
The solution is to trick Windows into thinking there are no other drives at install time.

Here's how I did that.

1. Installed W2k onto the " C " partition and used Norton Ghost to back up an image to another location.

2. Start the XP install.

3. In the windows partition setup section, create a new partition for the new install. On my machine that is the " F " partition because of two cdrom drives.

4. After you create the new partition, delete the " C " partition

5. Install XP onto the new partition.

6. After that install is completed, restore W2K from the Ghost image.

7. Edit the grub.config to include any Windows systems.

Bah...duh I wish I'd thoughta that before I started installing stuff all over the place. Thanks.