Friday, January 19, 2018

installation - Creating a dedicated grub partition before installing ubuntu



I have suffered from boot configuration a lot. If windows is installed above ubuntu, ubuntu doesn't boot. if ubuntu is installed above windows then windows goes away.



Of course, reinstalling grub fixes these things, but I suppose having a dedicated grub partition is going to help me a lot.




So I have fresh windows installed. I am about to install ubuntu 11.04. But before I install Ubuntu, I want to create a dedicated boot partition first.



I thought creating a separate partition of about 200 mb and mounting it as /boot was called dedicated partition but it seems it is not.



How to create a dedicated boot partition during ubuntu installation?



Another option is to make a dedicated Grub2 partition (as opposed to dedicated /boot partition you mount at boot), see herman's tutorial.



Advantage: you can remove/install OSes at will.




Disadvantage: you need to edit the grub.cfg file manually. To avoid having to do that after every kernel update I recommend using the link to kernel images, not the kernel image itself, for example use something like



linux   /vmlinuz root=UUID=3e4xxxxx-027b-407c-ba1a-xxxxxxxx ro   quiet splash


not



linux   /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-28-generic root=UUID=3e4xxxxx-027b-407c-ba1a-xxxxxxxx ro   quiet splash 



For more info on using symbolic links instead of full paths for kernel images look here.



Disadvantage2 (thanks psusi): when installing a new OS make sure you do not install its Grub image to MBR. Install it without Grub and then manually edit the grub.cfg file to include the new OS.


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