I have a multiboot system with several disks. The first disk is 500GB and has all of the operating systems.That disk is partitioned as follows:
500GB drive sda (P = Primary, L = Logical partition type)
P 5GB sda1 NTFS -- contains grub2 and various utilities, including parted magic, mini XP, Asus Express Gate.
P 80GB sda2 NTFS -- Windows 7
P ----------------------------- unformated space
E xtented partition space
L 12GB sda5 SWAP -- Used for all linux OS's
L 100GB sda6 EXT4 -- OpenSuSE 12.2
L 100GB sda7 EXT4 -- Ubuntu 12.10
L 60GB sda8 EXT4 -- Mint Linux 13
L 60GB sda9 EXT4 -- Bodhi Linux 2.2
The question I have is, why won't the OpenSuSE installer & bootloader setup in YaST allow me to use my NTFS partition as a separate boot partition?
Lets put it this way, I figured out how to do it, but updating the grub menu requires booting the OpenSuSE rescue DVD and manually mounting /sda5 as root, /dev/sda1 onto /boot, chrooting and running grub2-install --modules=ntfs.mod /dev/sda. This puts the grub2 core image just after the master boot / partition table and the grub2 modules in /sda1/grub2.
This scheme works just fine for all OSs, but it is a bit inconvenient to update the grub2 menu. I like the OpenSuSE boot theme, with the little logos next to the entries.
I also installed OpenSuSE 12.2 on a virtual machine and specified a separate boot partition (ext2) which worked fine. I looked at the /etc/fstab entry on the VM and tried to duplicate it on my 500GB disk by mounting sda1 NTFS partition in fstab. Upon booting I get dropped to a root shell because there's no fsck.ntfs. I changed the fstab entry to omit checking the fs (6th param changed to 0) but the same thing occurred.
If I have to live with chrooting to use sda1 - NTFS as my boot partition I will, but am looking for a more elegant solution. If anyone has ideas I'm all ears. Thanks!-
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