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Linux Desktop Hacks
book

Linux Desktop Hacks

by Nicholas Petreley, Jono Bacon
March 2005
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
342 pages
15h 55m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Linux Desktop Hacks
Give Your Computer the Boot #1
Chapter 1, Booting Linux
|
3
HACK
It’s important to note how GRUB deals with disks and partition numbers.
Unlike Linux, GRUB refers to the first disk as
hd0 and the first partition as par-
tition
0. In Linux this is designated as /dev/hda1. Basically, if the letters that des-
ignate the hard drive in Linux were numbers, you would subtract 1 from them.
Therefore, an a (1) becomes 0, a b (2) becomes 1, and so on. Also, you would
subtract 1 from the partition number itself. For example, a boot partition
located on /dev/hdb3 becomes
hd1,2 in GRUB parlance. In the previous stanza,
you refer to the location of the kernel (
root)ashd0,0, but on the kernel line,
you refer to the root partition as /dev/hda3. Because it is a kernel parameter, it
uses the normal Linux method of referring to disks and partitions. The final
part of the stanza uses
savedefault to make the stanza a default option in the
GRUB menu, and the command
boot actually boots the system.
If you want to add another operating system, simply add it elsewhere in the
configuration file. A Windows stanza looks like this:
title Windows 95/98/NT/2000
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
When you are booting non-Linux operating systems (most likely Win-
dows), you usually will need to use the
makeactive and chainloader key-
words. The
makeactive keyword is used to set this partition as GRUB’s main
root filesystem device. The
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596009119Supplemental ContentCatalog PageErrata