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I have 2 hard disks — a 240 GB SSD and a 2 TB standard disk. I put Windows, Linux Mint, and Ubuntu 16.04 on the SSD, the sda and Fedora and Kali Linux on the 2 TB disk, sdb.

Now, as I was installing the systems (I installed them in the order Windows, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora and Kali Linux) until I exhausted the space in sda while installing Ubuntu, the grub menu kept changing as per the latest OS installed. Meaning, when I was done installing Linux Mint, Mint's grub2 menu had showed up during PC boot, and likewise, after I followed it up with Ubuntu's installation, Ubuntu's grub2 showed up. Now, I proceeded to install Fedora, followed by Kali Linux. But this time around, I see that same Ubuntu grub2 menu is being displayed. Also, in order to select Fedora or Kali, I need to press my boot options key F11 (MSI motherboard), where it shows Fedora and Kali. If I select and proceed with either, I'm able to boot to the respective system.

Tinkering around in Ubuntu, I tried the following:

sudo os-prober
sudo update-grub

These commands did the job and added Fedora and Kali to the Ubuntu's grub2 menu.

Now, I would like to know:

  1. Why has Ubuntu's grub2 assumed the role of native bootloader?
  2. How to make any grub2 menu as the native bootloader in cases similar to mine, i.e, when multiple Linux distros and/or multiple hard disks are involved?
mchid
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skrowten_hermit
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1 Answers1

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You installed Fedora and Kali Linux on the 2 TB disk, sdb, and you installed their bootloaders to sdb too. If you had installed their bootloaders to sda,they would have been used as default bootloaders, because the computer boots from sda by default.

It is possible to install a bootloader afterwards, 'repair grub'. See these links,

help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/Installing

help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

The method you used with

sudo update-grub

is a good method, and should also be used, when 'the other' linux operating systems have upgraded (new) kernels. Otherwise these new kernels will not be available via the grub menu.

sudodus
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