NB this methodology appears to work for both EL5 and EL6 also.
...
Originally Posted by
rickhg12hs
I've had a dual boot Vista/FC6 and now F7 laptop running for about 6 months with no problems. I used EasyBCD to extend the Vista boot loader to chainload GRUB on another partition. It's worked without incident for a long time.
I would not recommend using the Windows Boot Manager to start anything other than Windows. I personally install Grub as my primary boot manger (on the primary boot sector).
Ideally, Windows is installed first, and then Linux (eg EL5/EL6) is installed (with grub) - which generally overwrites the Windows boot sequence. Grub automatically detects the Windows partition and adds to grub.conf the necessary command to load it.
However, if Windows is installed after Linux, grub can be extended to load the windows partition (eg XP, Win7) by manually adding the necessary command to grub.conf.
Added are some examples of grub.conf windows boot commands below. "PARTITIONINDEX" in these examples should be set to the partition index of Windows. This should generally be "0" if Windows was installed first*. You should use the command "/sbin/fdisk -l" (referenced by ppesci) to determine/confirm the partition index of Windows (or the Windows Boot Manager). Note, there is no blank line between the line "title..." and the line "root...".
title Windows XP
root (hd0,PARTITIONINDEX)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1
title Windows 7
rootnoverify (hd0,PARTITIONINDEX)
chainloader +1
* Note again; you shouldn't have to modify grub.conf at all if Windows was installed before Linux. However exceptions do exist. An example of an exception would be if you RE-installed Windows and Windows changed the partition in which it needed to initialise its boot sequence/manager. These things happen, from experience - particularly on laptops with pre-installed copies of Windows.