Arch Linux

tanders12

Member

Registered: 2010-12-17

Posts: 13

[SOLVED]Where does grub2 get installed?

Here's how my Intel X-25M 120GB SSD is set up:

|   30GB NTFS (Windows 7)    |                  50 GB LVM (Arch)                    |    30GB NTFS Storage   |

In the LVM I have /,/boot,/home,/var,and /tmp all on separate LVs.

I installed and configured LVM per these instructions during Arch install:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lvm

Apparently you need grub2 in order to boot from LVM so I installed it during Arch install per these:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Grub2#Installation
and
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Grub2#LVM

It did some weird things but seemed to work however I'm not sure if it installed correctly. I'm having trouble getting grub to see my Windows install.

Here's my question, did grub2 get installed to the MBR, to the LVM /boot partition, or both? If it got installed to the MBR how can I configure that so I can get my Windows partition booting?

Thanks

Last edited by tanders12 (2011-04-10 07:01:08)

RiceKills

Member

Registered: 2010-05-31

Posts: 72

Re: [SOLVED]Where does grub2 get installed?

Ok, I might be wrong about this but the way I understand boot loaders its like this. The MBR contains a small program that points to the real boot loader, in Archlinux's case, grub2. Windows does the same thing, ie, it installs a program in the mbr that points to the real boot loader (ntldr). the way grub boots windows is it actually points to ntdlr, which is what the mbr would point to if it wasn't a dual boot.
DO you understand? you can actually have multiple boot loaders, but only one pointer can be on the MBR.

post your /boot/grub/menu.lst and we can help you out

Last edited by RiceKills (2011-04-10 03:48:34)

tanders12

Member

Registered: 2010-12-17

Posts: 13

Re: [SOLVED]Where does grub2 get installed?

I figured out that my problem with booting Windows 7 was that I was running grub-mkconfig but I wasn't using the -o option to write it to /boot/grub/grub.cfg. Once I did that it worked great. And your explanation helps me understand the MBR a little better, thanks