Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 125520
Always install grub to /boot, use "standard" MBR
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:44 EST
One thing that would make Fedora cooperate a little more with other OS installs on the same drive (whether from Redmond, other Linux distributions, or even other versions of Fedora) would be to always only install GRUB to the /boot partition (at least whenever /boot is a primary bootable partition). Then optionally install a "standard" master boot record (maybe from FreeDOS) that does the normal "find the primary partition with the active flag and chain to it" thing during boot. This way, if/when something replaces the MBR (like those Redmond OSes like to do), all it takes is a simple "fdisk" to change the active partition back to /boot to get Fedora booting again. The interface could be the same as it is now; just change the actual work to always install to /boot, always set the active flag on /boot, and only replace the MBR if "install to MBR" is selected.
I've thought about this before and came up with some reason not to do it, although I don't remember what that was now. Will consider for FC3.
I am often wrong... I believe that grub can boot partitions that the normal MBR can not, but I do see value in being able to set the boot partition to something else in dos and just having it work.
It can, and it can do so regardless of whether it's booted from MBR or from the /boot parition. Note that for some filesystems installing to /boot is not an option. I think that one of XFS and Reiserfs gets clobbered