Install in HD (system reserved partition) to boot OS on different physical drives

[henriqueweis]

Hello there, 

I'll try to inform all the details of my case here. I have an old Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop. I replaced the DVD drive for my HD with a caddy adapter (the DVD is IDE, the caddy I installed converts sata to ide socket).

So I installed an SSD in the HD tray with windows 10 and got my 500GB HD as a storage. I left 30GB out for future Linux dual boot.

well, yesterday I decided for Linux mint and Installed in the 30GB free space of the 500GB storage drive in the caddy adapter.
i selected this drive as well for installing the bootloader.

The problem started when i tried to select this drive as the main boot drive in Bios configuration, but this bios does not have the option to select hard drive priority, and if you put CD/DVD as the first boot option it doesn't recognize for the boot.

So I tried to keep booting from the windows of the SSD and installed easyBCD for windows and tried to add an option to dual boot with the Linux on the other drive with no success.

Finally i though of getting rid of the system reserved partition (I moved the windows bootloader to C: and deleted the system reserved partition), and though of installing a GRUB on this 500mb free space and manually redirect the boot for Windows or to linux.

And that is my question. is it possible to use WinSetupFromUSB and install its GRUB on this 500mb partition, and the edit the menulist to direct the boot wherever I want?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[jaclaz]

2 hours ago, henriqueweis said:

And that is my question. is it possible to use WinSetupFromUSB and install its GRUB on this 500mb partition, and the edit the menulist to direct the boot wherever I want?

Well, then you are asking a "wrong" question, i.e. you are risking to fail for the chocolate covered banana :

https://jdebp.eu/FGA/put-down-the-chocolate-covered-banana.html

WinSetupFromUSB is simply not the "right" tool for the scope.

You can add grldr.mbr (which is part of grub4dos and NOT of GRUB) as an entry to your existing \boot\BCD (it is not really-really an "install") or deploy the code that chainloads grldr (which is still the same grldr.mbr) to the MBR and thus set grub4dos (and NOT GRUB) as your "main" bootmanager.

Until the (stupid) windows 10 it was easy to add a grldr because the BOOTMGR parsed the good ol' BOOT.INI file, starting with 10 it is needed to add the grldr.mbr to the BCD, see:

http://reboot.pro/topic/21527-windows-10-bootmgr-no-longer-reading-bootini/

You can get the latest version of Bootice from Softpedia, here:

https://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Boot-Manager-Disk/Bootice.shtml

And the latest version of grub4dos here:

http://grub4dos.chenall.net/downloads/grub4dos-0.4.6a-2018-09-19/

 

If you don't want to touch your MBR (and a few sectors after it) and don't want to fiddle with the \boot\BCD, you can still try installing the grldr on the 500 MB partition (more like your original plan) but it has to be seen how it works with latest versions of grub4dos.

Traditionally (with the "standard" MS bootsector loading NTLDR, i.e. the 2K/XP bootsector for FAT32) it worked just fine with grldr renamed to NTLDR:

http://reboot.pro/topic/4423-start-grub4dos-grldr-from-nt-bootsector-why-not-working/

Since your current volume bootrecord is invoking BOOTMGR, you will need to run bootsect.exe with the /NT52 switch on the volume to write the MS bootsector code invoking NTLDR, then copy to the volume the grldr renaming it to NTLDR.

The "sample" menu.lst in the grub4dos download already has a provision to automatically search for and chainload a BOOTMGR, so you should be able to boot to your Windows 10 without issue after the "install" of grub4dos.

Then we will see how to boot the Linux and make a suitable menu.lst entry for it.

jaclaz

 

 

[henriqueweis]

47 minutes ago, jaclaz said:

Well, then you are asking a "wrong" question, i.e. you are risking to fail for the chocolate covered banana :

https://jdebp.eu/FGA/put-down-the-chocolate-covered-banana.html

WinSetupFromUSB is simply not the "right" tool for the scope.

You can add grldr.mbr (which is part of grub4dos and NOT of GRUB) as an entry to your existing \boot\BCD (it is not really-really an "install") or deploy the code that chainloads grldr (which is still the same grldr.mbr) to the MBR and thus set grub4dos (and NOT GRUB) as your "main" bootmanager.

Until the (stupid) windows 10 it was easy to add a grldr because the BOOTMGR parsed the good ol' BOOT.INI file, starting with 10 it is needed to add the grldr.mbr to the BCD, see:

http://reboot.pro/topic/21527-windows-10-bootmgr-no-longer-reading-bootini/

You can get the latest version of Bootice from Softpedia, here:

https://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Boot-Manager-Disk/Bootice.shtml

And the latest version of grub4dos here:

http://grub4dos.chenall.net/downloads/grub4dos-0.4.6a-2018-09-19/

 

If you don't want to touch your MBR (and a few sectors after it) and don't want to fiddle with the \boot\BCD, you can still try installing the grldr on the 500 MB partition (more like your original plan) but it has to be seen how it works with latest versions of grub4dos.

Traditionally (with the "standard" MS bootsector loading NTLDR, i.e. the 2K/XP bootsector for FAT32) it worked just fine with beginning renamed to NTLDR:

http://reboot.pro/topic/4423-start-grub4dos-grldr-from-nt-bootsector-why-not-working/

Since your current volume bootrecord is invoking BOOTMGR, you will need to run bootsect.exe with the /NT52 switch on the volume to write the MS bootsector code invoking NTLDR, then copy to the volume the grldr renaming it to NTLDR.

The "sample" menu.lst in the grub4dos download already has a provision to automatically search for and chainload a BOOTMGR, so you should be able to boot to your Windows 10 without issue after the "install" of grub4dos.

Then we will see how to boot the Linux and make a suitable menu.lst entry for it.

jaclaz

 

 

15

Man, it is too complicated for me. I'll study it from the beginning.
So for now, i'll forget about my idea of using the 500MB free space to fashion some booting system with grub4dos.

But, to only fix my problem of accessing the Linux on the other HD? how can I add this Linux with BOOTICE ?

[jaclaz]

The screenshot from BOOTICE seems just fine, of course you need to add grldr.mbr and grldr to the root of your D:\ drive.

After having saved the BCD  at next boot you should have two options, Windows 10 and Linux Mint, if you choose the latter you should find yourself on the grub4dos command line prompt grub>, if you also copied to D:\ the menu.lst you will have a number of "default" options, press key "c" to get to the command prompt.

Now you can try the commands to boot your Linux Mint (if the commands work, then you can add them to a menu.lst).

Loosely the needed commands are three (+1 in command line only):
1)  establish root to the proper volume
2) load the kernel
3) load the initrd
4) issue the "boot" command (only on command line, when you write this on a menu.lst entry the "boot" command is implied and executed at the end of the entry)

So it could be something like:

root (hd0,0)

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-4.4.0-57-generic root=/dev/sda1 ro 

kernel /boot/initrd.img-4.4.0-57-generic

boot

The name of the kernel and of the initrd depend on the exact version of Linux Mint.

As well the name/numbers of the drive may need to be adapted:

First partition on first disk grub4dos=(hd0,0) Linux=/dev/sda1

Second partition on first disk grub4dos=(hd0,1) Linux=/dev/sda2

First partition on second disk grub4dos=(hd1,0) Linux=/dev/sdb1

... etc, ...

If you already installed the linux on the first disk or disk 0 (the one that contains the D:\ volume), and you installed the "default" GRUB2 on this first disk, you may be able to chainload the MBR of the first disk and have the GRUB2 boot the linux, i.e.:

rootnoverify (hd0)
chainloader +1
boot

If you can boot to a "live" version of Linux (or however have a way to access the volume where linux is installed) you can check the GRUB.CFG file, find the entry that should boot the Linux Mint and post it, then we can "translate" from GRUB2 syntax to grub4dos one.

jaclaz

Edited December 17, 2018 by jaclaz