Dual Booting Help

[smitty92]

Ok, I'm not a complete noob at the whole dual booting thing but im requesting some back up on this one. Ok first off let me tell you what i have, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, OSX, and Vista.

Now i just got done completly redoing my computer so that i could have vista back cuz i did miss it a little. So i reformatted the whole thing and now i have all 4 OS's running and operational. But my Bootloaders are all outta wack. I Just want one bootloader but instead i have 3, GRUB comes first, It askes me between wich linux i want then it has Windows Vista(loader) which it added upon installation.  when i go to it, it goes to Chameleon 1 and asks between OSX and Vista then on vista it always asks weather i want to boot in safe mode or yada, but i like that. So my question is what do i need to use to boot all 4 from one screen? and how do i get rid of chameleon cuz i dont really want it unless i have to have to have it.

Can i use Grub?

Windows bootloader using easy BCD

or can Chameleon 2.0 work for linux? cuz ireally like the gui idea. Just need some help no major topic but it'd be nice to have fixed, Thanks

[srs5694]

What you ask is tricky. To the best of my knowledge, no OSx86 boot loader (Chameleon, PC-EFI, Boot Think, etc.) can directly load a Linux kernel. On the flip side, the most common Linux boot loaders can't directly load an OS X kernel. The Windows boot loaders are, AFAIK, even more hopeless.

 

I know of only one boot loader that can do as you ask: GRUB2. This is still under development, but it can, in at least some circumstances, do what you want. See this thread for my experiences configuring it in this way. Note that I'm still 1 for 2 on it; it works on one system, but not on another. (I haven't put in a lot of debugging time on that second system, though.) Even GRUB2 won't directly load the Windows kernel; you can only use it to chain load BCD. It sounds like you've got your BCD configured to give you Windows-specific boot options, and you'll need to investigate Windows-specific ways to eliminate those options if you don't want to see them.

 

GRUB2 is tricky to configure and may not work as reliably as the more common OSx86 boot loaders for booting OS X. You might be better off using a chain-load configuration, either using GRUB Legacy or an OSx86 boot loader (Chameleon, etc.) as the primary boot loader and then using another boot loader to boot some OSes. If you set the timeout value low enough, you won't even notice that you're using two boot loaders. For instance, if you use Chameleon as your primary boot loader and set up GRUB Legacy in your Linux boot partition with a zero-second timeout, what will happen is that when you select Linux in Chameleon, GRUB will load and then begin booting Linux so quickly that you'll see a very brief flash of information revealing that GRUB is booting Linux before the Linux kernel messages begin to appear.

 

Note that such a configuration can cause problems, though. For instance, if you upgrade your kernel but the new kernel doesn't work, you might need to boot an emergency CD/DVD to edit the GRUB configuration to get everything to work again.

[vilpostus]

As an option you can use GRUB (legacy, the default one with Ubuntu and Kubuntu). Check this link http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php...c=74510&hl= Setup the GRUB menu accordingly. Then check this link http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/li...uration-434882/ and set the 0 timeout for the other Linux's GRUB. Now it should boot instantly without your involvement.

 

Then replace Chameleon with EFIv10 or other EFI version http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=183165 . But if you use some of the Chameleon's features (as DSTS, SMBIOS), removing Chameleon is not an option. In that case you should "fine-tune" it, for it to boot stight to OS X. http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/lofiversi...hp/t160689.html

 

As result, you should have now one boot loader booting all OS'es from one place.