Arch Linux

remerico

Member

Registered: 2007-08-29

Posts: 4

Overwriting boot loader

Hello,

I'm planning to install Arch on our machine. Currently, I have Windows and Ubuntu installed as dual-boot using Grub. My hard drive setup is composed of:

hda1: 30GB - Windoze XP [ntfs]
hda2: 8GB - Ubuntu [ext3]
hda3: 1GB - Swap
hda5: 193GB - Data partition [ntfs]

Since Arch linux uses Grub as its boot manager, is it safe to overwrite Ubuntu's Grub with Arch's Grub bootloader, whilst keeping Windows bootable? Thank you!

tom5760

Member

From: Philadelphia, PA, USA

Registered: 2006-02-05

Posts: 283

Website

Re: Overwriting boot loader

It should be fine, just make sure you have an entry for Windows in your /boot/grub/menu.lst   It should look something like this:

title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

If you have something like that in your grub config, you should be fine to boot Windows.  Good luck!

remerico

Member

Registered: 2007-08-29

Posts: 4

Re: Overwriting boot loader

Okay thanks. I will try that.

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: Overwriting boot loader

You could also use your existing grub install to boot Arch.

remerico

Member

Registered: 2007-08-29

Posts: 4

Re: Overwriting boot loader

Hmm, my /boot partition resides on the same partition where ubuntu is. If I reformatted that partition, will grub still be available?

mac57

Member

From: St. Somewhere

Registered: 2006-01-06

Posts: 302

Website

Re: Overwriting boot loader

Assuming you are planning on leaving Ubuntu where it is and carving out a new partition for Arch, this would work - you could just add the Arch entry to the Ubuntu /boot/menu.lst. I wouldn't recommend this though, since your machine would cease to boot if you even decided to delete the old Ubuntu partition (and trust me, once you have used Arch for a while, you will wonder why you ever bothered with Ubuntu - no flames please - just a personal opinion from someone who did just this and ditched Ubuntu pretty darn fast afterwards).

One last word of advice. Before you install Arch, assuming you are planning on overwriting the Ubuntu partition and making it your Arch partition, SAVE OFF YOUR CURRENT MBR! Just in case anything messes up, it could be a life saver to have saved the MBR off onto an external media (USB hard drive, USB memory stick, etc. etc. ... some media that is not on the drive in question). If you *should* mess up your MBR during the install process, you would lose all access to your hard drive. However, you can get it back by just restoring your saved off MBR in that case. If you don't have a saved off MBR, all you can do is grit your teeth and reload your disk (all of it!) from scratch. I speak from experience!

To save your MBR to an external media (I will use a floppy here since my machine has one), su to root and do the following:

# dd  if=/dev/hda  of=/mnt/fd0/hda-mbr  bs=512  count=1

If the worst comes to the worst and you mess up your MBR, you can then just boot any Linux live CD, pop the floppy back in and reverse the process:

# dd if=/mnt/fd0/hda-mbr of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

and you are back on the air.

---

Cast off the Microsoft shackles Jan 2005

remerico

Member

Registered: 2007-08-29

Posts: 4

Re: Overwriting boot loader

Thank you very much for the advice

I haven't started installing Arch yet because I have a lot of stuff to do, so I might do it next week. I will definitely backup my MBR in case the worst happens