I think what I want to do is long and convoluted; then again, it might be somewhat easy, and I'm just overthinking it.
Here's the setup I want to achieve:
- The internal drive (sda) is one giant WinXP partition (sda2), a tiny one for a boot partition (sda1), and the MBR.
- On an external drive (sdb), I will create multiple partitions for several distros. This drive will be either an HDD in an enclosure or something like a WD passport. This will be attached via USB 2.0.
I know it is possible to install grub to the MBR of sda
and boot an sdb
partition from there. I also know I'll need to edit grub to chainload Windows and list all the distros. However, I have the following questions:
- If I disconnect sdb and want to select + boot into Windows, is grub going to get upset? In other words, does the grub menu just display what you tell it to, or does it go hunting for those other options immediately and will have problems because some have disappeared?
- If I disconnect sdb, I'd love for it to still be bootable on another computer. If I have a boot partition on sdb as well as sda, but have my BIOS set to use the internal MBR first, can this be achieved?
- What if I want to use something pretty like burg or plymouth? How will this change things?
I'm sure the answers are out there somewhere, but I'm finding it hard to Google for!