Arch Linux

Ben9250

Member

From: Bath - England

Registered: 2010-06-10

Posts: 208

Website

Altering Distro's

Okay, so I've been using Arch for a while now, and my experience has been really good. So much so that I would like to make it my Main distro (so far I have Ubuntu on here too). What I would like to do is take Ubuntu off temporarily i.e. get rid of the partitions it's on, and then because Ubuntu's root partition had the boot flag and had the Bootloader (grub2) I want to make Arch have the bootloader, Then I would like to put Ubuntu back on from live CD (it's very cluttered now anyway so I don't mind deleting and then re-installing it) so I have a easy distro to fall back on should everything go horribly wrong, then I would like to put Fedora or Gentoo on to see what they are like - I hear fedora is very current with features and innovation and Gentoo has a different way of installing things so I'd like to experience them. So the bedrock of my question/issue is, what is the best way to go about this/avoid breaking stuff when I delete Ubuntu and put on Arch's bootloader (I think its grub not grub 2), and would I need to delete the bootlaoders of the other distro's after I've installed them from live CD's. I'm guessing I make the arch root partition have the boot flag too (I have a root, home and var for Arch) after I install Arch's bootloader, then I can reboot and make sure Arch works fine on its own, and then proceed to Ubuntu and other distro's. I decided I should ask the more experienced of the community for any releveant advice/instruction/information, before I go and undertake this as it is quite a significant change to my system. As both brub and brub2 are in the wiki I take it they can both be used without issue?

Cheers =]

Last edited by Ben9250 (2010-07-07 20:25:32)

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"In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it."
  - H. G. Wells

benob

Member

Registered: 2008-11-11

Posts: 187

Re: Altering Distro's

Are you more interested in trying distros or in setting up grub so that you can multiboot them?
If it's the first option, you could try to run them in an virtual machine (vmware...)

Ben9250

Member

From: Bath - England

Registered: 2010-06-10

Posts: 208

Website

Re: Altering Distro's

I do have virtualbox so I could virtualise them, but I'd also like to get rid of Ubuntu and put it back on again because I've got so many programs and rubbish on there as I haven't maintained it since running Arch so I got lots of out of date coursework and it needs updating etc, and I'm getting annoyed with it being the default OS to boot up. So it's easier for me and less annoying if I take off ubuntu and put the bootloader on Arch and put ubuntu back on.

[EDIT] Apparantly I can do some sort of chainloading thing for distro's with their own bootloader. Do I have to do this? or can I just add an entry to and Arch GRUB and remove that distro's (say ubuntu) own grub(2)?

Last edited by Ben9250 (2010-07-07 21:06:31)

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"In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it."
  - H. G. Wells

Surgat_

Member

Registered: 2007-08-08

Posts: 317

Re: Altering Distro's

You can just install Arch's grub onto /dev/sda (or whatever) and make entries on (Arch's) /boot/grub/menu.lst for every OS you have. It's not difficult.

Last edited by Surgat_ (2010-07-07 23:07:29)

e1in9

Member

Registered: 2010-06-23

Posts: 6

Re: Altering Distro's

You won' t necessarily need to delete the bootloaders of the other distro's after you've installed those distro's. Because a lot of distro's (like Arch) have an option to install a bootloader or not. I never tried Fedora but I'm pretty sure e.g. Gentoo will not automatically install any bootloader on your MBR.

Also using Grub "legacy" instead of Grub2 is easier imho (just editing menu.lst). And yeah by default Arch will install Grub (instead of Grub2) if you choose to install Grub during installation.

Chainloading is only really needed for booting Windows.
For Linux you can do with specifying the partition and kernel/initrd files in menu.lst.

In the past when I had really messed up my Grub I booted a Puppy 4.x Live CD which has a program included to restore Grub (it scans for OS'es on partitions and adds them). A program like that is also on SystemRescueCD.