Eero Ahonen wrote:
> I'm not sure about CD-ROM, but at least Grub is able to boot via PXE.

I've done more experimenting with this, now that I have a Vista machine 
I can wipe and restore easily.  I wouldn't recommend trying this without 
a complete-machine backup.

At least on the 64-bit OSes (Vista x64 and Suse11 x64) it seems that the 
default MBR for either will now try to boot the active partition. That's 
nice.

And in spite of the baroque advice on the intratubes, it's pretty 
trivial to set up the same mechanism to get Vista to boot Linux without 
any extra software necessary (assuming you don't have only a recovery 
disk or some other lossage like that).

Install Vista. If it's already installed, shrink the partition from 
inside Vista (since it is claimed Linux messes that up on Vista's NTFS).

Install Linux, but don't set the active partition or install grub to the 
MBR. (I install it all in one primary partition, just because it's easy 
enough to back up only what you want to in Linux.)

Figure out which boot block boots Linux. In my case, it's the boot block 
of that one primary partition. It's probably the boot block of whatever 
/dev/sda? that holds your root partition. Use dd to make a copy:
dd if=/dev/sda2 bs=512 count=1 of=/media/my-usb-stick/linboot.bin

Boot back to Vista. (If you messed up, boot the Vista disk, go to 
recovery, start a command prompt, and use diskpart to set the Vista 
partition active.)

Copy x:linboot.bin to (say) the root directory. (Where x: is your usb 
stick, obviously.)

Then, tell Vista about it, which goes something like this:
bcdedit /create /d "SuSE 11 Linux" /application bootsector

This will print out a GUID, which you should copy into the copy buffer.
Then bcdedit this, pasting in the GUID for each "<paste>"

bcdedit /displayorder {current} <paste>
bcdedit /set <paste> device partition=C:
bcdedit /set <paste> path \linboot.bin

And if I remember right, that's all you need to do. The next boot will 
give you a choice of Vista or Linux.

The advice on the intertubes is to download a replacement for bcdedit 
with its own version of grub (which doesn't work, at least with my 
suse). It worked when I told it to boot via LILO oddly enough. :-)

One of these days, I'll get around to making my own site for putting up 
stuff like this I've figured out that can actually be searched.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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