[Mageia-dev] Grub2 vs. Grub Legacy in M3
Frank Griffin
ftg at roadrunner.com
Sun Jan 20 14:06:19 CET 2013
On 01/20/2013 07:55 AM, Maurice Batey wrote:
> So I suspect that he (like me) does not know how to boot a GRUB Legacy
> install from a GRUB2 boot menu. (Yes, I know GRUB2 boot menus do show
> options to boot existing GRUB Legacy installs, but in my experience
> (with Ubuntu and Mint) they *fail* to boot them.) Despite my requests
> in various newsgroups, NO ONE has offered a description of how to get
> a GRUB2 boot menu to successfully boot a GRUB Legacy install. Can you,
> please, Frank?
I've never used grub2 myself. But the article states that if you have
grub2 on the MBR and define a chainloader menu.lst entry for a partition
that has grub on the PBR, it works.
That makes sense. Chainloading simply means that the MBR bootloader
reads the PBR into memory and passes control to it exactly as the BIOS
reads the MBR into memory and passes control to it. Assuming that both
grub and grub2 support chainloading correctly, neither one of them
should have any idea whether it's an MBR that was loaded by the BIOS or
a PBR that was chainloaded by an MBR.
This glosses over other sources of problems like UEFI and GPT, but it
has always been the case that if you want to support multiple boot
loaders, you have to use a lowest common denomination architecture that
they all support.
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