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I have 2 drives one with Vista Ultimate x64 and Ubuntu on the other. I have just bought and setup a new case the Antec 1200 which has space for nine drives, I want to eventually get some more and put on Windows 7 and some different flavours of Linux.
I have had this setup with Windows and Ubuntu for a good few months without any issues but the annoying thing is that every time I switch the machine on I have to go into the BIOS and choose the Hard Drive which contains the OS I need to boot into! The default drive it boots into is Ubuntu.
Hmmm - so now I will finally get round to my question
Can I "easily" add the option to choose the OS to boot from Grub? I have exactly no idea what I must do - or even if it's possible?
If I could do this it would make things alot quicker and easier overall - would some kind soul please help me in this quest?
# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS # on /dev/sda1 title Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition rootnoverify (hd0,0) savedefault makeactive chainloader +1
That's the entry for XP from /boot/grub/menu.lst on my dual boot. You would have to edit the rootnoverify and the title accordingly. I don't think it would be any different for 2 drives, and it can't hurt so long as you don't set a conflict.
The lines I provided came from a ubuntu machine. It is at the very end of the file. You will need to know whether ubuntu considers the vista disk to be hd0 or hd1. The menu.lst file will refer to the disk as hd0 or hd1 in your case where sda would be hd0 and sdb would be hd1 I believe. (hd0,0) refers to the first disk first partition. I would assume that vista was installed before ubuntu. In which case you could probably cut and past the line I gave you and change the title to "vista" or whatever you want it to be called at boot time.
I am new to Linux, but enjoying the experience with Ubuntu 9.10, currently!
I have exactly the same problem, two drives and two OS's. I figured out how to achieve the alternate boot from other threads - so far so good.
They suggested modifications to menu.lst, as above, but I don't have this file. Later I found a suggestion that /boot/grub/grub.cfg could be altered - I have this and could see where to make the changes, except that I can't save the altered file!
I've tried sudo su in terminal, Alt + F2 gksudo gedit and even tried activating a root login password. Nothing seems to allow me to save the modified grub.cfg. I suspect that I am not actually activating root privileges since activating a root password goes through the motions, but saves nothing permanently.
I had been using sudo to gain root privileges, but I was still "user". When I came to save the file I couldn't do so because it was read only and I couldn't use chmod on the file because I was not the owner.
I used sudo su and "became" "root". This allowed me to change file permissions and, hence, save the modified file. I then changed the permissions back to read only.
It seems long winded and I'm sure there will be a neater way of achieving the same goal, but that I have yet to learn - perhaps it's in Linux 102!. As it is I've achieved my goal of having a dual boot system which selects XP by default and Ubuntu on selection!
you can also make a password for root and login to root's desktop
sudo su + password
passwd root
then logout and login to root account, make sure you call up login edit in System/Administration/Login Screen
and check the box thats says allow root/admin login first!
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