alternative distro

[mariomucho123]

I have to say the mint forum seems great....however the distro does not...at least installing. I do not want GRUB to become the default bootloader and destroy the windows one.
Can someone suggest a linux or F/OSS distro that has such attributes; secure, easy to install on a hdd, does not require reformatting the entire hdd..leaves windows OS alone, installs the bootloader to a seperate parition or the linux OS parition....or is bootable via windows bootloader, does not become default bootloader, has plenty of dev software avaiable

Keep in all that in mind and that I am not a guru.
Thanks.

[oobetimer]

I do not want GRUB to become the default bootloader and destroy the windows one.

Grub does not destroy windows bootloader.

If you not want to install Grub to MBR, you can install it to linux´s root partition instead. For booting that linux, you need some 3 th part program, like EasyBCD or Grub4Dos.

http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/grub4do ... /GRUB4DOS/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/grub24dos/files/

[mastablasta]

Keep in all that in mind and that I am not a guru.

which is exactly why messing with bootloader should be left to the OS installed (which in this case is a very good one).

windows boot loader is not destroyed but grub is installed in front of it. can easilly be resoterd to previous setting if that is necessary. one command is run from windows install CD and the windows MBR is again in the first position (grub is gone). actually the one that destroy the boot loader is windows MBR.

my point is that
1 - linux mint does not require formatting of whole disk but rather you need only a portion of disk (partition) to be formated in linux file system
2 - it does leave windows OS alone. completely.
3 - as mentioned you can install grub to linux partition however then you need to change the boot order manually in BIOS. while htis way boot comes up you select the os oyu want and you go... you can also install boot loader to a floppy disk if you like and then select to first boot from that.

an option exists called mint4win which installs the operating system inside virtual disk that is inside widnows and can later be removed form the system like any other windows programme. i believe it uses windows boot loader to load grub. however it has some significant shortcomings compared to side by side install. have a lok here on how this looks in Ubuntu (on which Mint is based): http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/installing/wubi

[mariomucho123]

windows boot loader is not destroyed but grub is installed in front of it. can easilly be resoterd to previous setting if that is necessary. one command is run from windows install CD and the windows MBR is again in the first position (grub is gone).
my point is that

Yes but the MBR is overwritten to start GRUB first. Oh and well the windows bootloader is not destroyed but the MBR kind of is in some sense. Since windows cannot boot now unless there is GRUB.

1 - linux mint does not require formatting of whole disk but rather you need only a portion of disk (partition) to be formated in linux file system
2 - it does leave windows OS alone. completely.
3 - as mentioned you can install grub to linux partition however then you need to change the boot order manually in BIOS. while htis way boot comes up you select the os oyu want and you go... you can also install boot loader to a floppy disk if you like and then select to first boot from that.

1. I never said that linux mint did
2. Again I was not referring to mint in particular
3. I heard you could install all of GRUB to the linux pariton...but that it is unstable and requires hacking

[proxima_centauri]

* Moved to Chat about Linux & Other Distributions from Newbie Questions

[altair4]

3. I heard you could install all of GRUB to the linux pariton...but that it is unstable and requires hacking

I don't know who told you that it was unstable but I've been doing that for about 10 years now. I use BootitBM ( and BootItNG before that ) as my boot manager and when I install another distro I tell the installer to put grub into the "/" directory for that distro and then point BootIt to that partition. The only time this was ever an issue for me was when I used PCLinuxOS. PCLOS would install it correctly and would continue to work but if there was ever an update to grub it automatically overwrote everything and sent it to sda.

I no longer use PCLinuxOS.