I use GAG boot Manager (open source) so that I can boot from a choice of 9 different operating systems on my workstation. Virtual machines are fine, but if you want to look at systems working on bare metal hardware then you create partitions whereby you can install different OS's with the booting system placed on its own partition and using GAG to manage this.<br>
<br><a href="http://gag.sourceforge.net/">http://gag.sourceforge.net/</a><br><br>I recently had a problem where I wanted to look at Ultimate Linux Gamers Edition, an Ubuntu 10.04 derivative, with the intention on putting it on one of my son's machine as he is a gamer. The default bootloader of this OS is GRUB2 and I was unable to boot into this partition as GRUB2 is at present incompatible with GAG Boot Manager. I found that after looking through all the Ubuntu forums and mix-mashing all the information that I could create some sort of solution or workaround. I thought I should post this here ,if anyone uses GAG Boot Manager, so you don't have buy proprietary boot managers to rectify this problem.<br>
<br>Boot from the live cd/dvd of Ultimate Linux or whatever OS you have installed GRUB2 and go into terminal mode and issue the following commands (in this case Ubuntu)<br><br>$ sudo mount /dev/sdX /mnt/boot (where sdX is your partition e.g. /dev/sda8 and you have a separate boot partition, which you need using GAG)<br>
$ sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev<br>$ sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc<br>$ sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys<br><br>We will do a chroot now<br><br>$ sudo chroot /mnt<br><br>We remove GRUB2<br><br>$ sudo aptitude purge grub2 grub-pc<br>
<br>We now install GRUB 0.97 (legacy GRUB)<br><br>$ sudo aptitude install grub<br><br>Now at this point I found that the GRUB2 files in the /boot/grub directory were still there so I did<br><br>$ sudo cd /boot /grub <br><br>
and removed all the files and sub-directories with<br><br>$ sudo rm -R *.*<br><br>I then updated GRUB which installed the menu.lst and stage1/2 files <br><br>$ sudo update-grub<br>$ sudo grub-install /dev/sdX (where sdX is the partition where you Ultimate Linux or another OS installed)<br>
<br>To exit chroot press CTRL-D<br><br>Unmount the virtual filesystems<br><br>$ sudo umount /mnt/boot<br>$ sudo umount /mnt/dev<br>$ sudo umount /mnt/proc<br>$ sudo umount /mnt/sys<br><br>Reboot<br><br>$ sudo reboot (or exit terminal and reboot from GUI)<br>
<br>When your computer restarts and goes into GAG boot manager delete the Ultimate Linux icon and re-install it with the pertinent partition and you're there. I hope the maintainers of GAG put GRUB2 support into the GAG system as it is the best open source Boot Manager there is.<br>
<br>p.s. As a greybeard, if any young dudes spot any typos or incorrect instructions or other ways to improve this procedure feel free to post because this will be the benefit to users.<br><br>Gordon <br><br><br><br><br>
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