Quad boot on NC10 (win, chrome OS, mac, linux)

[thomas3d]

I need to setup my Samsung NC10 with Quad boot menu.

Win7, ChromeOS, Mac OSX, Ubuntu 9
In the future when I get a bigger SSD I also want to have WinXP and Debian.

We use the machine to demo our Roozz plugin on all these platforms. Thus it is very smart for us that we can boot fast into all these OS's

But I have trouble creating a boot menu for Win7 and ChromeOS at the same time. Does anyone know how to do this?
I can install either of them to boot from MBR (all is working perfect). But I can't get them both to work from a boot menu.
If it is possible to do it with EasyBCD that would be great.

/Thanks, Thomas

 

[mqudsi]

Hi Thomas, welcome to NST.

I haven't had a chance to experiment with Chrome OS (which is pretty much all it'll take for me to support it in EasyBCD) but hope to in the (very) near future....

Do you know what Chrome OS uses to boot?

 

[JustinW]

Well I've done some searching and it appears Chrome doesn't use any paticular bootloader like grub. Its supposed to be standalone on a netbook primarly so if you want to use it on a machine with Windows you are best VMing it.

 

[mqudsi]

Ah, I was hoping it would be GRUB

Thomas, like Justin says, for now VMware would be your best bet..... Once I have time, I'll take a look at Chrome OS and see what I can do.

 

[thomas3d]

Thanks for your answers.

It runs slow in VMware, thus I will just run it from a USB key for now.
Then I will check back later to find out if anyone have solved the dual boot issue.

Addendum:

Funny:

I was able to dual boot ChromeOS from the harddrive in funny way. Let me explain how.

First I installed ChromeOS on my SSD from another computer by writing a diskimage to the disk.
Everything worked well and I could boot ChromeOS from the SSD inside my NC10.
Then I installed win7 from a bootable USB stick (which has DVD install image).
Then I installed EasyBCD on top of win7 to try to create a dual boot menu. But no matter how I did it I had no luck.

Then I made a Bootable USB stick with the same ChromeOS image as above, when I booted from it I noticed a funny thing.
My NC10 did not boot from the USB stick, but it actually boots from the previous install ChromeOS on the SSD. (but the USB stick help trick it to boot from first partition of SSD)

I even tried to rip out the USB stick as soon as the NC10 had finished showing the Samsung BIOS image on screen. It still boot ChromeOS from SSD.
Now I am thinking that you can use a similar functionality in EasyBCD boot menu to trick it to boot from ChromeOS.

I will be happy to help with testing and figurering out how to do this. Please write me at thomas (at) etjam (dot) dk

Best regards, Thomas

 

[DReJ]

You can use grub2 for loading all systems. To install Chrome you can do following actions:

1) you need two partitions on disk for chrome: C-ROOT (at least 1 GB, I have 2 Gb)
and C-STATE. You can create them with fdisk. I will refer to C-ROOT as /dev/sda7
and C-STATE as /dev/sda8.

2) you need to copy Chrome image (rootfs.image) to sda7 (change to you partition)
Please be careful here and check command line twice.
sudo dd if=/path/to/rootfs.image of=/dev/sda7 bs=4096

3) sudo update-grub2
It must find Linux on partition sda7. For me it was "Debian... blah-blah-blah"

4) sudo nano /boot/grub/grub.cfg

edit the section added by update-grub2 script

It should look like

menuentry "Chrome OS" {
insmod ext2
set root=(hd0,7)
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 1704d9f5-ca7d-4d29-986e-402327148e23
linux /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda7 quiet console=tty2 init=/sbin/init boot=local rootwait root=LABEL=C-ROOT ro noresume noswap
initrd /boot/initrd.img
}

change (hd0,7) to your partition

 

[thomas3d]

Remember you must format C-STATE to Ext3 and I think C-STATE must be placed right after C-ROOT. (that no other partitions in between)

 

[Knocks]

So is this officially supported in Easy BCD now? I'd like to avoid sudo'ing anything on my own.