How do I set up Grub properly to quad-boot Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD?

Posted by Joe on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Joe
Published on 2012-05-02T20:59:35Z Indexed on 2012/06/04 10:45 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 221

Filed under:
|
|
|

Grub has gone completely insane on me. My quad-boot system was working great up until I upgraded Ubuntu to 12.04. Since Ubuntu overwrote the Grub stuff I had to repair it with my Mac OS X and FreeBSD entries. After this, trying to boot Mac OS X gave me the error "couldn't open file" and FreeBSD gave the error "no such partition". Windows and Ubuntu worked fine.

So I tried repairing again because I figured something must've gone wrong in the install process. Then only Ubuntu would boot. Trying to boot Windows would give me the error "no argument specified".

I tried repairing Grub once again, since I seemed to be getting different results each time. This time, Ubuntu no longer appeared in the Grub menu, and the errors for the other OSes were the same.

So I booted into the Ubuntu 12.04 live CD and ran Boot-Repair with recommended settings. Now Grub is completely skipped and Windows boots up.

I have absolutely no idea what is going on or why I get different results every time I reinstall Grub. Here is how my partitions are set up:

  • sda1 - Storage drive,
  • sdb1 - Windows,
  • sdb2 - Mac OS X,
  • sdb3 - FreeBSD,
  • sdb4 - Extended,
  • sdb5 - Ubuntu,
  • sdb6 - Shared storage,
  • sdb7 - Shared Storage,

Here's my grub.cfg file: grub.cfg

© Super User or respective owner

Related posts about ubuntu

Related posts about boot