Am Sat, 11 Jun 2011 23:07:00 -0400 schrieb "Joe(theWordy)Philbrook" <jtwdyp@ttlc.net>:
Actually It's been a long time since I had actual boot failures with Arch... And if memory serves it wasn't the updated kernels fault, though I no longer remember what I'd done...
You see, those cases in which a kernel update leads to a boot failure are very rare. ;-) And Arch Linux kernels are usually tested in [testing] and are only moved to [core] if there are no bigger issues found.
However I have experienced other Linux that no longer booted properly upon kernel upgrades... When my grub installation fails to properly boot one of my Linux, I immediately use the chainloader entry to get that distro's own grub. Having a back-up in case a new kernel doesn't work for me just feels like the right thing to do. And now I know (and will have notes) how to resolve that problem in the event that an Arch kernel upgrade ever does fail me. Thanks again! ... Well I call it grub legacy because that's what gnu.org is calling it now...
That's what it's called.
According to them the old grub has been replaced with a new version. Though I don't see it as an improvement. I think the only Distro I've got installed that really likes "grub 2" is Ubuntu, But since I didn't let it use ext4, I can still even boot that with the classic grub. ☻
Which bootloader you need depends on your installation and hardware, not on the distro. There are at least 3 bootloaders (grub legacy, grub2 and syslinux) which have different capabilities and can't easily be replaced in any case. But all of them can handle ext4.
I guess you would either call it just a "grub partition" Or perhaps you would have said "boot partition" without specifying which boot loader is installed there.
I guess you meant the /boot partition. ;-)
It is not that uncommon among multi-Linux-Distro, multi-booters to have a separate bootloader installed to the MBR from the ones each distro installed to their root partitions. Though the others I've heard about usually just select the appropriate chainloader entry for the Linux they want to boot, which in turn usually has a very short timeout before it automatically boots it's default entry.
I myself rarely bother with the chainloader entries. They are mostly only there in case I goof when I edit the entries I normally boot from. This configuration also makes it easy to use a supergrub disc in the event that my normal boot partition gets corrupted as each installed Linux has it's own boot loader so all I'd need to tell supergrub is to boot the appropriate partition...
I would completely remove the chainloaders. Make one /boot parition for every distro, but only install one bootloader from your main distro into the MBR. Don't let the other distros install a bootloader and just configure the one bootloader to boot the other distros, too. That's the easiest way which should always work. Btw., if you let every distro install a bootloader into the MBR, the previously installed one will be overwritten. There won't be two different bootloaders in the MBR. Depending on what you are doing with your multi-boot system, you probably should consider using virtualization. Heiko