I’ve just installed grub2 on my Debian laptop, and I wanted to write a quick note on how to get dual booting working. Grub2 seems to have a far more complex configuration system than grub, this may be a good or a bad thing. One feature of this is a /etc/grub.d directory which contains a set of scripts to configure what items should be listed on the boot menu.
$ ls /etc/grub.d/
00_header 05_debian_theme 10_linux 30_os-prober 40_custom README
The scripts get run in order, each adding features to the boot menu. To dual boot Windows you can acheive this in two ways.
- Write a script which manual adds windows
- Use the os-prober script.
I opted for option 2 since it seemed the easiest. However, this os-prober script does not work unless the package os-prober is installed. So:
$ sudo apt-get install os-prober
Once that is installed you can reconfigure grub by doing:
$ sudo update-grub2
Generating grub.cfg ...
Found Debian background: moreblue-orbit-grub.png
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.30-1-amd64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.30-1-amd64
Found Microsoft Windows XP Professional on /dev/sda1
done
When you reboot you should now have Windows on your boot menu.