[syslinux] Dual-booting VMware and chainbooting GRUB

Pete Zaitcev zaitcev at redhat.com
Fri Mar 18 22:01:43 PDT 2011


Dear All:

I am having trouble trying to dual-boot VMware and Linux, and I tried
everything I could come up with.

The situation is that /dev/sda is fully used by VMware and /dev/sdb
is used by Linux. VMware uses Syslinux, so I thought this would be
simple... However, it is not. The bootable FAT partition is too smal
to have kernels in it. As a fallback I tried to chain-load GRUB,
but that did not work.

Here's the syslinux.cfg:

DEFAULT linux

PROMPT 1
TIMEOUT 50

LABEL linux
  COM32 chain.c32
  APPEND hd1

LABEL grub
  COM32 chain.c32
  APPEND hd1 1 grub=/grub/stage2 grubcfg=/grub/grub.conf

LABEL grub2
  COM32 chain.c32
  APPEND fs grub=stage2.dat grubcfg=menu.lst

LABEL grub3
  COM32 chain.c32
  APPEND hd0 4 grub=stage2.dat grubcfg=menu.lst
  
LABEL vmware
  COM32 safeboot.c32

None of the above works except the VMware. Chainloading hd1 ("linux")
ends with no new messages, nothing happening. System is not locked up
though, ctlr-alt-del reboots it. Same happens with label "grub".
Labels "grub2" and "grub3" complain of partition not found.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thank you,
-- Pete




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