[syslinux] Dual-booting VMware and chainbooting GRUB

[Gene Cumm]

On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 01:01, Pete Zaitcev <zaitcev at redhat.com> wrote:
> Dear All:
>
> I am having trouble trying to dual-boot VMware and Linux, and I tried

I'm assuming either VMware ESX or VMware ESXi Installable, correct?
ESXi is also known as the vSphere Hypervisor.

> everything I could come up with.
>
> The situation is that /dev/sda is fully used by VMware and /dev/sdb

Normal installs will do this.

> is used by Linux. VMware uses Syslinux, so I thought this would be

Last I checked, they used Syslinux 3.63.  Was chain.c32 already in the
FAT file system?  Where did you get it from?

> 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

This will depend on a properly configured MBR at that drive.

> 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

Newer versions of SYSLINUX also understand the LOCALBOOT directive but
I'd have to check what version it was introduced in.

-- 
-Gene