On Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:24:15 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> Oh, that's not Grub, that's SYSLINUX - Grub is hard-disk only to the
>> best of my knowledge.
> 
> OK. Whatever. Obviously it would have been a PITA to install Linux there
> even if I could get it to boot.

Well, yeah - I was just confused because you were saying GRUB, but 
because that doesn't work on removable media (and isn't designed for 
that).  I was hoping I hadn't missed something with GRUB development. ;-)

> 
>>> Maybe. I don't have any trouble using Windows' bootloader to load
>>> GRUB. You just have to set it up right. It's pretty trivial.
>> 
>> Yup.  But it's not something that I've ever seen automated by the Linux
>> installers.
> 
> No, because they can't write to NTFS partitions. 

ntfs-3g can write safely to NTFS partitions.  I almost said it didn't 
matter, but forgot that with Windows you do have to modify boot.ini for 
that purpose.

> So they can't modify
> the Windows boot menu to accomidate Linux. So they clobber the Windows
> boot sector with the GRUB boot sector.  Which, honestly, wouldn't be all
> *that* awful, if they actually followed the rules for booting,which is
> to say, boot the partition marked "active".  If they did that, you could
> boot back and forth between Windows and Linux without being at the
> console.

Yeah, it's really kinda - well, expected, I guess - that MS behaves that 
way about how the system boots.  They want to be the only OS there, so 
they just play like they are.  They should stop doing that, maybe they 
will with Windows 7?

Jim

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