How to fix Plop Boot Manager with Linux

[benbrockn]

Hello, so I'm trying to configure a dual-boot setup with Windows and Linux but using Plop Boot Manager as the boot method.

I set it up in virtualbox having Plop & MiniXp on one harddrive with a full Slitaz distro on a seperate hardrive with it's own grub bootloader on that linux harddrive.

Like so:

sda1 - Plop Boot Manager (full install) & (In the future, MiniXp will be on here too)

sdb1 - SliTaz (full install with grub bootloader)

==========================================================

This is what I did for Plop:

I set up the partitions like this:

This is the profile setup:

And on the profile setup window, you select "linked partitions" to get to this screen, and I set it up like this:

The set boot partition was on both sda1 & sdb1 with no luck (Here it lists them as hda1 & hdb1)

==========================================================

Forgetting about the miniXp for a moment (since that doesn't matter right now), the Slitaz distro runs on it's own if I boot straight to sdb1. If I boot it up using Plop it gives an error of "This is not a bootable disk". Maybe I configured Plop wrong??


Any help is greatly appreciated.

-Ben

 

[McHenryB]

Why not save yourself grief and just use Grub?

 

[benbrockn]

I'm not well acquainted with grub, and I wanted to use Plop. I've tried grub to dual boot before and I never got it to work.

 

[McHenryB]

Fair enough (although it's the easiest way of dual-booting).

 

[benbrockn]

I noticed that I didn't make this a Question/Solution thread but instead made it a Discussion thread. How can I fix that? Can a Mod change the thread type or delete this thread so I can make it a Question/Solution thread?

 

[benbrockn]

Ok, so a guy told me to install grub to the boot sector of sdb1. Grub should already be installed on the MBR of sdb, that's why BIOS will load it when you select the HDD, but Plop is reading the boot sector of the partition of sdb1.

How the heck do I install grub to the partition of sdb1 ???

I've tried this:

When I use (as root):

grub-install /dev/sdb1

It errors "Could not find device for /boot: Not found or not a block device"

So I looked up the error on Google and instead mounted sdb1 to /mnt/a and entered in this:

grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/a --recheck /dev/sdb1

Which says:

Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.
Installation finished. No error reported.
This is the contents of the device map /mnt/a/boot/grub/device.map.
Check if this is correct or not. If any of the lines is incorrect, fix it and re-run the script 'grub-install'.

(fd0) /dev/fd0
(hd0) /dev/sda
(hd1) /dev/sdb

I'm not sure what fd0 is since I only have two disks attached and both of those are hd0 & hd1.

I restart the system, plop will not load sdb1 (linux). BIOS will load sdb1 (linux).

Any ideas??

Thanks,
-Ben

 

[skittle]

Do not install to sdb1 you install to /sdb

The archwiki and probably ubuntu wiki go into depth about this. The Arch and Ubuntu wiki also have guide on how to chainload GRUB to Windows if you search.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB#Install_to_disk

After install grub you may need to do grub-mkconfig I don't know what distro you run or whatever