With MS support for XP ending 8Apr2014 I am considering upgrading my software configuration. I currently multiboot Windows XP and Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.2.0-35-generic i686) with GRUB 1.99-21 ubuntu 3.7 updated automatically by ubuntu's update manager. At one point my hardware passed MS's test for windows 7 so I believe that is an option.
I want to retain XP so I don't need to repurchase all the old software that currently works fine and because I have hardware that requires the game port interface that MS chose not to support in newer software. I am very happy with Ubuntu and find myself using it by preference when I can. I'm not sure where I placed my XP install disk after I mis-applied GRUB and overwrote the MBR (back when I think Ubuntu 9.04 was current). I would like to avoid that problem in the future. Perhaps I could dd the 440 or 512 bytes of the MBR for insurance just in case. My hardware is a generic PC with an AMD Duron and 2 GB of RAM. XP is on a master IDE drive. A SATA drive has three primary (MSDOS) partitions containing another XP "drive", Ubuntu, and linux-swap. Until recently these 3 partitions resided on the slave IDE interface but gparted was kind enough to move them all to a bigger newer SATA drive. The old drive is now retired. I know grub is great at multiple O/Ses but windows is anti-social toward other O/Ses. My questions are: 1 Can grub2 handle both XP and 7 in one configuration along with Linux? 2 If so, can it still be compatible with Ubuntu's update manager? 3 How would one approach the reconfiguration? 4 Will 4 partitions be sufficient? 5 Will GRUB want a partition? 6 What would I need to be careful to avoid? I would expect to buy 7 to install on the SATA drive. I'm not sure how to install 7 without corrupting the MBR for XP. I didn't put the linux and linux-swap partitions in an extended partition on the SATA drive as they were on the IDE drive. I hadn't figured out yet how to create the extended partition in gparted and I still had a spare. I expect if I needed more than 4 partitions I could copy the two linux partitions to a USB drive and back to an extended partition. I have enjoyed reading your advice. Thanks for any illumination you can provide. I copied the To: line, I hope I have it right. I ensured this is plain Text. Randy _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel