How to install and boot 145 operating systems in a PC

[saikee]

maek3rcr129 ,

Welcome to JustLinux!

The answer to your questions are

(1) Only the MS systems (Dos and Windows), Solaris and BSD systems boot loaders use the booting flag. Linux's Lilo and Grub never use it. Typically a MS systems stage1 boot loader (it doesn't have a name) searches the 4 primaries in the partition table and boot whichever one that has the booting flag switched on. We can place Grub inside a Fat partition, set it bootable and use Xp, Vista or Win7 boot loader to boot up Grub. I have demonstrated it in this thread.

(2) My thread was written when Linux still called the IDE disks as hda, hdb, hdc and hdd whereas sda, sdb etc were reserved for Sata disks or USB devices. Later kernels now call all disks sda, sdb, sdc etc. I placed Grub in hda3 as a data only partition. Each of all other partitions has an operating system inside and also its own boot loader.

It is an extreme case to demonstrate that Grub can be anywhere and can exist without an operating system attached.

If I put Grub inside say Dos or Win3.1 then I can't boot that system because the boot sector would be taken over by Grub.

In a normal case one can use a Grub from any of the Linux to do the same job. However I thought Linux users may like to know some powerful features of Grub.