Richard Owlett <[email protected]> wrote: > The purpose AND rationale SHALL be that the default OS choice *SHALL BE* the > first OS installed. > > WHY? > No matter how badly I mess up, a "hard reset/cold boot" shall *ALWAYS* boot > to a known working OS.
There's a way to achieve this - sort of. Slightly modify the files in (rom memory) /etc/grub that build grub.cfg. Arrange for your primary "safe" OS to have a distinct label, then set that label as the default OS. That won't prevent installing/modifying another OS from clobbering grub.cfg - but neither will *any* other method that relies on a specific grub config. Thus there is absolutely no possibility of building a system that fits your needs of "No matter how badly I mess up" simply because there is no way to prevent you messing up the boot partition and/or bootloader. The only way I could see you getting that level of safety would be to have a separate (small) drive that has a write-protect function. Thus you make that your primary boot device, configure stuff, make it (or at least the bootloader & boot partition) read-only, and then nothing can mess it up. You could have your primary system not have a separate /boot partition - so /boot for it is within it's root partition. That would help as the other OSs you install/modify won't see a boot partition and so won't clobber it - but they can still clobber the bootloader. This would also mean you'd need to reboot into you safe system every time there's a need to update grub.cfg - but that's a good idea anyway as ideally you only ever want one system in charge of it. _______________________________________________ Help-grub mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-grub
