Any general purpose "Rescue Disk"?

[Warrior]

So I decided to give Linux a spin, this time with more patience and being more open minded.

I was thinking just throwing GRUB onto a bootable CD then edit command line, boot into Linux then install GRUB onto my MBR. Is there any easier way to do this? I think this is pretty easy. (My problem was I installed Linux before Windows and then Windows overwrote my MBR). Hell I have a few CDs I can stand a couple experiments.

[Sidoh]

You can't install GRUB to your MBR after Windows has overwritten it?

[Warrior]

You can, no easy way to get GRUB to run on Windows "Grub4Win" is too messy for my liking and the only other option is cygwin and ./configure complains about something when compiling it from source. I guess another option would be running the binary on cygwin but even then if anything goes wrong I'll be locked out of Windows for a while.

[Sidoh]

You can, no easy way to get GRUB to run on Windows "Grub4Win" is too messy for my liking and the only other option is cygwin and ./configure complains about something when compiling it from source. I guess another option would be running the binary on cygwin but even then if anything goes wrong I'll be locked out of Windows for a while.

Couldn't you just temporarily use LILO until you figure out how to install GRUB in the fashion you want?

[Warrior]

You can, no easy way to get GRUB to run on Windows "Grub4Win" is too messy for my liking and the only other option is cygwin and ./configure complains about something when compiling it from source. I guess another option would be running the binary on cygwin but even then if anything goes wrong I'll be locked out of Windows for a while.

Couldn't you just temporarily use LILO until you figure out how to install GRUB in the fashion you want?

I have the solution currently I was just wondering if this had happened to anyone before and if they had any other suggestions or cautions.

[Sidoh]

I have the solution currently I was just wondering if this had happened to anyone before and if they had any other suggestions or cautions.

Oh, haha.  Beats me.  Personally, I'd just use LILO.  I understand it's not as flexible, but it works quite well.

[mynameistmp]

I don't boot from writable media at all. I just boot from my trusty Slackware CD then pass the appropriate kernel parameters depending on which machine I'm on. Of all of the solutions this method provides, my favourite is the fact that random people can't walk in and boot my machines. All you've got to do when it drops you into the boot: prompt is give it the kernel image you want booted and pass the root drive you want as a parameter. There are directions written directly above the prompt (on Slackware). I'm not too sure if this is what you were asking.

[Joe]

You can, no easy way to get GRUB to run on Windows "Grub4Win" is too messy for my liking and the only other option is cygwin and ./configure complains about something when compiling it from source. I guess another option would be running the binary on cygwin but even then if anything goes wrong I'll be locked out of Windows for a while.

Couldn't you just temporarily use LILO until you figure out how to install GRUB in the fashion you want?

Or perminantly use LILO? I'm probably missing something here, but what's so great about GRUB?

[Sidoh]

Or perminantly use LILO? I'm probably missing something here, but what's so great about GRUB?

Warrior's a GRUB advocate.  It's apparently much better for OSDev.