Looking to multi-boot Arch correctly

leejosepho

Distinguished Member
Following months of trial-and-error in just about every area imaginable, I now have four Windows systems and three Linux systems booting on my machine ... and I am doing that with four inter-linked boot menus:

1) Win7's BCD offering Win7 and links to all other menus;
2) XP's "boot.ini" offering XP, 2K, 98 and the Arch menu;
3) Mint 9's menu offering Mint and a return to Win7's BCD;
4) Arch's menu offering Arch and links back to everything else.

All of that is working perfectly in spite of my having four types of GRUB involved:

1) GRUB4DOS ("grldr" from "boot.ini") presents the Arch menu;
2) EasyBCD's NeoGRUB presents the Mint 9 menu;
3) Puppy's GRUB wrote part of my "menu.lst" being used on (hd0,0) "C";
4) Arch's GRUB wrote its entries I manually added to my "menu.lst" on "C".

Here is my problem:

As instructed, Arch's GRUB has placed its own "menu.lst" in "/boot/grub" on its own "/boot" partition, but I am not using that "menu.lst" to boot Arch. So, and if I am understanding things correctly, I will have trouble later after Arch updates its "menu.lst" I am not using to boot Arch.

I have used EasyBCD to add Mint 9 to Win7's BCD, but I was not able to have EasyBCD do the same for Arch. So, I have used BCDEdit to add Arch to Win7's BCD, but I that entry sends my machine to "grldr" on "C" rather than to Arch's own GRUB on its own partition.

I hope I am explaining this well ...

I need to have a BCD entry for Arch's own "menu.lst" in its own "/boot/grub" folder on its own "/boot" partition, and I do not know how to make that happen.

Any suggestions?!

And of course, I thank you so very much.
 
Last edited:
A question for you, Terry, or certainly for anyone else:

I am using grldr and grldr.mbr inside the first partition on my primary drive, and my ARCH Linux is in a partition on another drive that presently has no active partition (and does not even need one, as far as I can tell). So then, it seems logical to me that I should somehow be able to place grldr and grldr.mbr and a menu.lst just for ARCH either in its own /boot partition (or maybe even in the first partition on that Linux drive), and to then use BCDEdit to simply change the path of the entry for ARCH in Win7's BCD at the beginning of my first drive.

Does that sound viable?

If that will work, and if I can then either figure out or learn how to change that BCD path for ARCH from "\grldr" to wherever else, I would remove the ARCH entries from both my "boot.ini" and "menu.lst" at the beginning of my first drive and only go to ARCH via the amended BCD entry pointing to a suitable partition on the Linux drive.
 
I'm very much a Linux noob, so the last one to advise on a complex multi-linux set up.
The "active" flag though is only of any relevance to the MBR. It's what's used to locate the primary partition containing the next stage of the boot.
Once the controlling boot manager is running and chaining to other boot options, the active flag is no longer used for anything.
 
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