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Grub, the grand unified bootloader is out in its second version (for quiet a while) and a lot has changed. Today was the first day where i have to deal with the new version, so it is time to write down the knowledge i earned :-).

After upgrading from windows xp to windows 7, the microsoft os acts as child and replace the grub with its one boodloader. So at this point nothing changes from xp to litle seven ;-). My task was to restor the grub 2 into the mbr to regain access to my lovely linux. After reading some howto's, i tried it with by doing the lazy way.

1. Start a linux live cd (or a live cd with an grub 2)
2. fdisk -l (to see what partitions and disk are there and find your linux/root partition
3. mount /dev/$linuxdisk$linuxpartition (e.g. sda2) /mnt
4. chroot /mnt
5. grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/$linuxdisk

Nothing to explain left for this task. But what if you want to adjust the grub? There are two screws for twisting on. First the file /etc/default/grub contains a lot of general settings. Second, the files in /etc/grub.d/ representing your boot options. Just take a look into the scripts, the help ans answeres are in there.

And here are some links. GRUB 2 bootloader - Full tutorial grub on wikipedia.org archlinux.org/grub2 ubuntuusers.de/grub_2