Re: Q:Installing Linux without touching MBR...

On Fri, 02 Dec 2005 02:57:30 +0100, <danr_18@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


David Gurvich wrote: 
As long as you have an available partition, other than the R&R partition
and the Windows partition, you can install there. If you don't have an
available partition you can repartition Windows to get one.  If you are
worried about overwriting the MBR you can use Windows multi-boot feature.

What is the R&R partition actually used for? 

If the OS wont boot up, it'll automatically boot up into a special
mode, which would allow some utlities to be run - including restoring
the system.

Windows multi-boot doesn't use the MBR? Of course MS' website only
describes how to set up Windows multi-boot with MS OSes... Are there
any websites which talk about using Windows multiboot with Linux?


I don't know about that, but Grub does overwrite more than just the sector
zero. It "embeds" the "stage1_5" file into 15 sectors or so, I guess it will
take the ones the support mail told about.

It is quite possible that you could install grub into the partition,
in which case Grub will not be the teh one to get controll transferred to
it from the BIOS during boot.

Windows has a file boot.ini, where you can specify a list of partitions you
want to boot from. I don't know for sure, however, if it does chain properly
into Grub on a partition, does anyone know?  I seem to remember having seen
the answer is yes, I'm not sure.

-Enrique
.

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