Select which OS to boot using a physical switch

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GS3
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Select which OS to boot using a physical switch

Post by GS3 »

I remember the good old days when I had a switch which would configure one IDE drive or the other as master so it would boot from that one.


https://hackaday.io/project/179539-hard ... ion-switch
A physical switch that determines the OS to boot each time the computer is turned on.
Uses an STM32 microcontroller to act as a USB mass-storage device, serving up a dynamic file.
This file can be loaded by the system's boot config to change its boot behaviour based on the physical input:
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spamhog
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Re: Select which OS to boot using a physical switch

Post by spamhog »

Thank you! I tried hard to keep using the old grub when grub2 came down the highway, so I understand the fascination.

But years have passed and I have come to really like the new way, with automated bootable drive recognition by grub-update AND by the BIOS itself, and the boot selector magic in a UEFI BIOS.

I now look into boot priorities via efibootmgr.

https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux ... fibootmgr/

Slightly scary to use, but not actually so bad as long as the firmware has entries for the hardware drives. Once you select the drive, the functioning system is automatically added to the boot selector list. On my firmware, there is no option to delete an entry, so I ended up with many phantom "ubuntu" entries, but efbootmgr can clean them out.
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