[NTLUG:Discuss] questions about intalling Grub and MBR

[Rick Cook]

On Thursday 19 April 2007 00:32, Chris Cox wrote:
> terry wrote:
> > You have 2 logical choices:
> >
> > 1) Have the bootloader write to MBR of each separate drive as you add
> > new drives and install new OS's on subsequent drives.  (Modern
> > computers have BIOS options to designate [any] drive to boot to, and
> > that's what you'll do to select which OS to boot [in this case].)
>
> Be careful here.  While you may be able to boot a particular drive
> it doesn't mean necessarily that the driver ordering rearranged.
> You can use a grub option however to force the hex id to be
> that of the "primary" drive.
>
> > 2) Overwrite sda's MBR  with new grub installation with each new
> > install and just keep including boot instructions for previous
> > installations.
> >
> > Choice #2 is best / easiest but the choice is yours.
>
> I like #2 better as well.  #1 can be very very confusing.
>

And choice #2 works even better when you have a common /boot partition that 
you can share between the various Linux distributions. One thing to consider 
in this mode is that the last distribution to be installed will set 
the "flavor" for the grub menus and may not play very nicely with the 
existing set of options. Check for the option to add other installations to 
the grub menu as you are completing each install.