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Why would anyone use GRUB to boot only Windows?
by gpvos 2y ago
Why would anyone use GRUB to boot only Windows?
- adrian_b 2y agoIn my opinion there is no reason for using GRUB for any purpose. I have considered it obsolete and I have stopped using it more than a decade ago. For the purpose of booting multiple operating systems on the same computer, including with multiple versions of the Linux kernel, I just keep a set of small USB memories, one for each operating system that I want to boot, which are formatted with FAT32 and which contain, in the case of Linux, the kernel, the initramfs file and syslinux to boot them. This is much safer and much more foolproof than having a multiple boot configuration on the computer, which can be damaged by Windows at any time. Even for people who do not want to boot from external memories, GRUB is not needed, because now multiple boot can be done from the UEFI menu, which can boot directly a Linux kernel without any extra boot manager.
- asveikau 2y agoSyslinux? Has that been ported to efi? I have one machine, maybe a year old, that won't boot legacy bios anymore. Edit: yes, apparently there is a kind of barebones UEFI port. In that scenario syslinux is doing the work of grub. There is nothing about grub inherently saying you need to multiboot with it.
- suby 2y agoThere is a limit to how much time I want to spend learning how to do things like that, and then configuring and dealing with a broken system when my exploration goes awry. It's a valid reason.
- bubblesnort 2y agoBecause last time I installed MS-Windows 10 it had the most beautiful unlimited blinking cursor in the corner and nothing else. Until I installed GRUB from a GNU+Linux live CD whose root fs wasn't an actual device and that broke grub-probe. But fortunately grub-mkconfig is a shell script. I don't know why it failed but it did and Grub saved the day.