Best Bootloader

[airrob]

Right now I'm dual booting OSX and XP, and OSX is handling the bootloading duties. Tomorrow, I'm going to install Ubuntu, which will load GRUB. Which is the best bootloader? I could also use XP's booting mechanism. I would like one where I could ideally rename the options, unless there's some way I could rename the HD that OSX is on.

[Deviant0ne]

I use chain0, and love it. I don't like installing extra sofware I don't need, and I'm not too fond of cheesy-looking boot menus (eg. BootMagic). Chain0 is easy and you can change the name of the operating system you wish to boot into (on the boot menu that is). I'd say go for chain0, but that's just my opinion.

[grrifiedducky]

Chain0 works for the windows bootmenu, but it doesnt work for linux, is there something like it for linux also? (SuSE) if not, what are the commands to add Mac OSX to GRUB?

[free30]

Chain0 works for the windows bootmenu, but it doesnt work for linux, is there something like it for linux also? (SuSE) if not, what are the commands to add Mac OSX to GRUB?

 

http://www.tprthai.net/bootmgr.htm

free30

 

I like boot loader but I don't use linux. Feel like I should say sorry for that but I'd just spend hours trying to do what I already can in windows, software evrything forget linux, it's only good on a removerable CD. Just incase.

free30

[airrob]

Here's another question. I've got XP handling the bootloading. Booting into XP works fine. However, selecting OSX gives me Darwin's menu, when I really just want to boot straight into OSX. Putting rd=disk0s3 doesn't select OSX by default. Any ideas?

[free30]

http://forum.osx86project.org/index.php?showtopic=17320

It just says no unless you put OS x on an active partition on another drive.

free30

[tripleboot]

There is definately a market out there for some ingenius bootloading programs that can handle all these different OS without having to add this or delete that. It gets realy tiresome. Personally I agree with the XP option for OSx86 to boot right to the desktop and not to Darwin.

[airrob]

So if I have Windows, OSX, and Ubuntu, and I want one bootloader to rule them all, how can I achieve that? I guess I would have to use Darwin, but it's the worst one!

[airrob]

I've installed Ubuntu and put this in Grub's file:

 

title OSx86

root(hd0, 1)

makeactive

chainloader +1

 

I get Error 12: Invalid Device. Any ideas?

[Mextrus]

I've managed to use the windows boot loader (boot.ini) to boot win2k/fedora core 4/osx. I've never used the method from ubuntu but I would figure you could probably manage to do it the same way. The process requires you to have a way to boot into ubuntu in a rescue mode after installing it to a partition on the disk. As described above, adding OSX to the boot.ini for windows is easy, just add the chain0 file to the root of your c:\ drive. Your boot ini should look something like this except yours will say winxp:

[boot loader]

timeout=15

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT

[operating systems]

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /FASTDETECT

C:\chain0="Mac OSX"

 

This setup does have advantages. The main one for me, is that the NT boot loader is the easiest to fix if something goes wrong, and still have your operating systems intact. The concept here is that the chain0 file can look for any OSX installations on any hard drive and then boot the darwin loader to load OSX. The same method works for linux sort of. If you want ubuntu or osx to be default simply replace the appropriate line in the boot.ini

 

To add ubuntu, you should install it to a seperate partition, but do NOT install Grub to the master boot record MBR, do not allow it to install to the primary partition which houses your windows boot loader. I don't know how easy that is to do under ubuntu, but under fedora core 4 it's an advanced option in the install process, just select that you want grub installed to the same partition as ubuntu. Once you have grub on the same partition as ubuntu, you'll need to boot into ubuntu using a boot disk (fedora has a rescue disk option that works great, just boot from the disk I would hope ubuntu has something similar but I haven't looked.) Once you have access to the command line of your ubuntu, the process is fairly simple. There is a command that you can use which will copy the first 512bytes of the partition (considered the boot sector) to a file. the command is [dd if=/dev/hda3 of=ubuntuboot.bin bs=512 count=1] You will need to be root in order to do this, but you'll probably be root anyway if you're in rescue mode. Use the command [df -k] to make sure you have selected the right partition as your source, so if your ubuntu partition is not hda3, replace that. When you run the dd command, you will now have a 512byte file called ubuntuboot.bin (I placed my in /opt/ubuntu.bin) now you need to transfer this .bin file to windows somehow, USB flash drive, a 4th partition formated as fat32 (linux/mac/windows accessable) or a floppy. Once back in windows, add the ubuntuboot.bin file to the root of C:\ just like you did for the chain0 file. Add a new line to the boot.in that reads [C:\ubuntuboot.bin=Ubuntu]

 

Complicated yes, but now you have windows handling the boot of all three. (Technicaly, you have windows loading it's boot loader, which then hands control to either of the other two OS's boot loaders. Grub or darwin.) I've been using this method for a while now, and my system quad boots, Win2k/Vista/OSX/FC4. The jump to add vista was tricky, but if you already have this method with xp set up, vista will simply keep the settings and allow you to continue to multi boot in the same fashion.