Yast Sets Up Grub's Menu.lst With A Strange Rootnoverify

Suppose for simplicity you have one hard drive with windows on primary partition 1 and Suse on primary partition 2. The entry in menu.lst as set up by Yast to boot windows from Grub in openSUSE 10.3 with a chainloader entry is as follows:

title windows
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader (hd0,0)+1[/b]

Notice that the root partition is set as (hd0,1) which is sda2, the Suse root partition.

Conventional wisdom all over the internet says that the root in a chainloader boot should be set to the windows partition (hd0,0) i.e. sda1; Thus conventional wisdom would have us use this entry below instead of the one created by Yast:

title windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader (hd0,0)+1[/b]

Indeed, both do work fine.

To illustrate, the GNU Grub handbook recommends this: 4.1.2 Load another boot loader to boot unsupported operating systems i.e. (hd0,0) instead of Suse's (hd0,1)

EDIT: further investigation shows different behaviour between various versions of Suse.

Suse Linux 10.0 and 10.1 don't designate a root partition at all, using this:

title windows
chainloader (hd0,0)+1[/b]

openSUSE 10.2 uses the conventional wisdom and designates the windows partition as the root partition, like so:

title windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader (hd0,0)+1
[/b]

And then there's openSUSE 10.3 which designates itself rather than the windows partition:

title windows
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader (hd0,0)+1[/b]

Can anyone explain or suggest why Yast uses all these different codes in different versions of Suse 10.x and only once (10.2) conforms to the codes recommended by the Grub handbook?

Thanks
Swerdna

My logic says the same. (YaST seems to disagree as with this thread). I watch with interest...

My logic says the same. (YaST seems to disagree as with this thread). I watch with interest...
[/b]

It was that thread you linked and TV-VCR's solution -- plus an equally puzzling issue another poster had re vista -- that set me looking into this stuff. It seems that lately we can't really give definitive advice re Grub and windows, particularly vista.

So far I've set ub scenarios on a spare multi-drive box I have to boot 2000 xp and Suse ina lmost every conceivable mix of relationships so I understand that now. I've yet to do the same for vista.

I have discovered that if you leave out the rootnoverify line, as Suse 10.0 and 10.1 do, that brings in a default which is to assume "rootnoverify (suse's partition)" i.e. in this example to say nothing as in 10.1 and 10.2 implies by default the root is defined as (hd0,1) where Suse is.

And I have Ubuntu installed where it does:

title Microsoft Windows XP Professional
root (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1[/b]

Which is interesting but not puzzling

Hmmm...

Swerdna

My first comment: The GRand Unified Bootloader ain't so unified.
10.2 allowed me to directly boot into my MSDOS-6.22 partition.
10.3 no longer catches that installation.
To boot into MSDOS I must select XP and then select MSDOS from the XP boot menu.
All that stuff included in your Ubuntu listing is part of GRUB.
My entries for root in menu.1st are root (hd1,0) for Linux, or rootnoverify (hd1,0)for XP and floppy.
The 10.3 version does not use root (hd0,0), the disk formatted for Microsoft, both DOS and XP, in the XP entry.

Curiouser and curiouser. Make it proprietary but call it open; openSuSE gets more like Sun all the time.

My first comment: The GRand Unified Bootloader ain't so unified.
10.2 allowed me to directly boot into my MSDOS-6.22 partition.
10.3 no longer catches that installation.
To boot into MSDOS I must select XP and then select MSDOS from the XP boot menu.
All that stuff included in your Ubuntu listing is part of GRUB.
My entries for root in menu.1st are root (hd1,0) for Linux, or rootnoverify (hd1,0)for XP and floppy.
The 10.3 version does not use root (hd0,0), the disk formatted for Microsoft, both DOS and XP, in the XP entry.

Curiouser and curiouser. Make it proprietary but call it open; openSuSE gets more like Sun all the time.
[/b]

If you have a dos on the first partition and win on any other partition you'll find that the following files are put onto the dos partition during the install of windows: boot.ini, ntdetect.com and ntldr and the MBR code is changed too to be windows MBR code, not DOS MBR code. Thereafter you must go to DOS via the windows multiboot that has been placed on the dos partition to supersede dos booting.

Then you make Suse's Grub to overwrite the windows MBR code with Grub's MBR code and the chainloader refers it to the first partition. Grub then picks up on boot.ini which looks like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
C="MS-DOS" [/b]

I can't see in that logic how you can boot direct to dos in 10.2 provided boot.ini is there as specified above. Unless that booting direct to dos was remembered by you from a time before windows wrote boot.ini onto the first (dos) partition and overwrote the dos MBR code with windows MBR code.

thanks for the info -- all very interesting

Swerdna

If you have a dos on the first partition and win on any other partition you'll find that the following files are put onto the dos partition during the install of windows: boot.ini, ntdetect.com and ntldr and the MBR code is changed too to be windows MBR code, not DOS MBR code. Thereafter you must go to DOS via the windows multiboot that has been placed on the dos partition to supersede dos booting.

Then you make Suse's Grub to overwrite the windows MBR code with Grub's MBR code and the chainloader refers it to the first partition. Grub then picks up on boot.ini which looks like this:
I can't see in that logic how you can boot direct to dos in 10.2 provided boot.ini is there as specified above. Unless that booting direct to dos was remembered by you from a time before windows wrote boot.ini onto the first (dos) partition and overwrote the dos MBR code with windows MBR code.

thanks for the info -- all very interesting

Swerdna
[/b]

Sorry to be so slow. The windows were 95, 98, and then back to 95. The Linux dists were RH and SuSE. And here I though that old LILO and GRUB was reading the fact there were two OSs listed in the MBR files installed by XP and using them both.