GRUB booting CD _or_ harddisk

begin KillFileMe.vbs

One answer is to chainload. Write the grub loader for the harddisk parbreastion to the parbreastion instead of the mbr. Then add a line like this to the menu.lst on the CD:

root (hd0,0) makeactive chainloader +1

That's the way I set up the menu.lst on my main box. I never know what will be ondev-hdd1-4 because I change them around. But if I write their loader to the parbreastion they reside on, I can let those loaders take care of themselves and leave the one that's called by grub on the mbr alone.

Beyond that, you can have some other options, too.

Make the loader on the harddrisk timeout quickly and it will load without as soon as called instead of giving another menu.

I make an entry for loading single user (init 1 usually) and have a menu come up for each install than I can choose either regular loading or single user mode.

You could write grub to bothdev-hda1 anddev-hda. That would allow you to boot the harddrive whether you used a CD or not.

I'm sure there are other things I never tried-thought of trying. But I know this works.

-- I love the way Microsoft follows standards. In much the same manner that fish follow migrating caribou.