2012/5/4 blind Pete <[email protected]>: > Wolfgang Bornath wrote: > >> 2012/5/3 blind Pete <0123peter- > [email protected]>: >>> >>>> But at which moment/occasion would you need that? >>> When do you use the installer? >>> Incompetent user: every month. >>> Tester: every week. >>> Mageia user: every nine months. >> >> No, I meant: at which moment in the install process and for which >> occasion? > > During a standard install at the start of the configuration section > there is a point where there is a message about > "PREPARING BOOTLOADER" please be patient, searching for other > systems, this may take a while, or somthing similar. Then the > Summary pops up. > > It could be done before that, immediately after partitioning. > Perhaps if the advanced button were pressed? > >>>> Only once when >>>> you install the distribution which you think will stay the longest > and >>>> whos bootloader will go into MBR. After that you don't need it any >>>> more because you will have to add new distributions manually to the >>>> list. >>> You can use drakboot as it is now to add "things to be chainloaded" >>> to the list. >> >> But that makes only sense for the bootloader which is in the MBR. So >> you do it once and never again. >> Whenever you add a distribution, you put the bootloader of this new >> one in its root partition. Then you boot the distribution which has >> its bootloader in the MBR and add the relevant 3 lines into its >> menu.lst. You can't use drakboot for that. > > It would make most sense to start with a bootloader in the MBR > then go to a root partition bootloader and finaly an operating Lystem, > but LiLo and GRUB let you go "up" a level back to the MBR's > bootloader, or "sideways". e.g. From /dev/sda to /dev/sda12 > to /dev/sda1 to /dev/sda to /dev/sda2 to an OS. It can even > loop to itself, pointless but it works. > > If you want to do things like that, then you need to be > very careful about how you label things. > > Do different things get listed in Mageia's bootloader config > depending on whether it is written to the MBR or the root > partition? Find everything if going to MBR, only list Mageia > stuff (and "back") if going to the root partition? > > BTW I was assuming that every distribution has its own tools. > If your "master" installation is Mageia (or even if it is not) > you can use drakboot to add chainloader commands to Mageia's > GRUB or LiLo configuration.
Well, if you say so, I'm not sure I fully understand what you described. Of course I never looked for such an occasion because my "steering distribution" (the one with the bootloader in MBR) is a small one without X and without any applications except for vim as editor (old version of grml, below 100MB) and a few commandline tools so it can also serve as a rescue system. So when I install Mageia after that I go to the summary in the installer, configure the bootloader to sit in the root partition of Mageia. Then at reboot I boot grml, add the 3 matching lines for the Mageia installation to the menu.lst and that's all. Likewise I can do with all following installations. I've been doing it for years this way. Of course this is not really something for a totally new user, OTOH a totally new user does not have several different distributions on his machine. But even such a user will be able to follow instructions (in the German mandrivauser.de wiki we have a step-by-step HowTo for that). -- wobo
