Quad booting?

[Woraug]

Ok, so here's my situation. I'm currently dual booting Vista and OSX, but I but to quad boot and add XP and Mandriva. If I install XP first, then Mandriva, will the Grub bootloader detect my OSX partition? Thus allowing my to quad boot without issue.

 

If I'm mistaken here, how would I properly go about this?

[srs5694]

The GRUB boot loader needs to be configured; it won't auto-detect anything. That said, Linux install programs do usually attempt to detect non-Linux OSes and add them to the GRUB configuration. Whether Mandriva's installer in particular will detect OS X is something I don't know.

 

There's another GRUB multiboot issue you should be aware of, and this requires some background: Boot loaders work in stages, from the first-stage (primary) boot loader code (which generally resides in the disk's first sector, or MBR), to the second-stage boot loader (which generally resides in the partition's first sector), to subsequent stages. There can also sometimes be "stage 1.5" code, which is executed after the MBR code but before the first-sector code. The problem is that OSx86 and Linux both need their own boot loaders; the OSx86 loaders won't load a Linux kernel directly, and GRUB won't load the OS X kernel directly. (I've heard that GRUB2 can load the OS X kernel directly, but with some significant caveats. I've not yet looked into this in any detail.) Thus, the usual configuration involves using either GRUB or the OSx86 boot loader as the primary boot loader and having that boot loader redirect the boot process to the other OS's boot loader. This may require backing up the MBR of the boot loader you intend to use as the secondary boot loader and redirecting the boot process to this backup file rather than to a partition. This is how I boot one of my systems: I've got a file with the contents of the MBR that Chameleon (an OSx86 boot loader) wrote, and I tell GRUB to chain load to that file when I boot OS X, whereupon the system acts as if Chameleon were booting from the MBR. Another way to do it is to use Chameleon as the primary boot loader and install GRUB in the Linux partition rather than in the MBR. This may be the simpler configuration in some ways, and it's likely to be easier to set up, so I'd suggest doing it that way, at least at first.

 

Another issue you must consider is partitioning. How many hard disks do you have? If it's only one, you may have a hard time squeezing all those OSes onto your computer using the old-style MBR partitioning scheme. Unfortunately, booting Windows from the newer GPT system is tricky at best, so if you've got just one hard disk, you may need to resort to a hybird MBR configuration. These are ugly and dangerous, but occasionally necessary. If you've got two disks, then things become much simpler, and you can probably install everything using an MBR scheme.