triple USB partition - GRUB/Win/Mac

The_B_Man

hi folks, I need some help.

I have a 16GB usb stick that i want to split in 3. Since Windows doesnt recognise anything but the 1st partition on a removable device, I have to look elsewhere.

I'm hoping to get grub on the first partition (9GB, with a distro or two, and my main storage), with a Windows install CD on the 2nd (3GB), and a mac install CD on the 3rd(4GB).

In Windows, usually I'd use grub installer bit since I used Mac to create the partitions, this doesnt work this time. It just doesnt pick up the stick at all. I have mac and ubuntu on vmware workstation so have access to them though.

Is there a way I can install grub on a usb stick from Ubuntu maybe? I was trying to do it yesterday but the usb stick would only boot to "grub loading" and then it would just give me the grub command line. I actually could manually load the kernel and initrd and the distro loaded but how can i ensure the menu.lst loads?
and also, how can you put it in the menu.lst to skip onto the next partition and boot off its boot sector?

thanks for the help.

The_B_Man

UPDATE:

I've gotten GRUB working but now just need the menu.lst settings to boot the 2nd (Win7 CD) a 3rd (Mac CD) partitions.

Anyone know what the syntax for this is?

thanks.

Johnboy1951

The_B_Man wrote: »

UPDATE:

I've gotten GRUB working but now just need the menu.lst settings to boot the 2nd (Win7 CD) a 3rd (Mac CD) partitions.

Anyone know what the syntax for this is?

thanks.

The boot stanza usually has the drive specified something like
(hd0,0) ...... first partition
so use
(hd0,1) .... for the second partition.

That would be for Grub1 ..... but the same idea of increasing the partition number to point to the next one should be similar in Grub 2.

The_B_Man

cheers, I was trying that but it kept giving errors.
The MAc partition was saying "unrecognised boot application" or something like that.

do you know if you can actually boot MacOS from Grub?

The windows one was telling me that there was no bootable disk in the drive, which is weird so obviously i didnt set the boot stuff properly, even though i've done it 50 times before!

Johnboy1951

The_B_Man wrote: »

cheers, I was trying that but it kept giving errors.
The MAc partition was saying "unrecognised boot application" or something like that.

do you know if you can actually boot MacOS from Grub?

The windows one was telling me that there was no bootable disk in the drive, which is weird so obviously i didnt set the boot stuff properly, even though i've done it 50 times before!

Sorry ...... no experience of MAC ...... or so little I haven't a clue
The only thing I ever remember doing was to format an external HDD so a MAC could save files to it.

regards.

Mathiasb

rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1


Something like that?

The_B_Man

ye thats what i have. I havent a clue why its not working.