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I'm triple booting Ubuntu, Win 7 and Arch. At present I'm using grub installed by Ubuntu.

I would like to replace it by installing Arch's grub.

My question is: Will Ubuntu updates break or replace Grub especially when installing kernel updates? Or will it simply ignore the grub installation?

I'm aware that I would need to update Grub from Arch when Ubuntu has a new kernel.

To Do
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    On a grub update Ubuntu may restore grub to location specified. You can blank that location, so grub does not reinstall to MBR. http://askubuntu.com/questions/503417/how-to-prevent-ubuntu-from-overwriting-grub-bootloader-after-update/503446#503446 OR: http://askubuntu.com/questions/458572/how-do-i-prevent-one-of-my-partitions-messing-with-lubuntu-grub-entries/458582#458582 – oldfred Dec 13 '14 at 15:35
  • What if I uninstalled the grub package in Ubuntu? – To Do Dec 13 '14 at 18:42
  • @ToDo Then you would need to somehow keep track of the Ubuntu Linux kernels to boot in Arch. Loading the opposite configuration file as a menu entry would be the easier solution. – LiveWireBT Dec 14 '14 at 00:12

1 Answers1

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I don't see a big problem with MBR installations.

You would overwrite the GRUB code in MBR with the one from Arch and load Arch's grub.cfg instead of Ubuntu's. Both ideally should be in /boot/grub/grub.cfg on their respective root partitions, so that every OS has it's own grub.cfg that it can maintain independently. To jump to the configuration of the other OS, you could include the following code (replace 848acb77-de99-4288-a62b-2bf9d7fbd643 and hd0,gpt2 with appropriate values for the other root filesystem) into /etc/grub.d/40_custom or what ever mechanism Arch uses and run the script responsible for updating grub.cfg (update-grub in Ubuntu):

menuentry 'Custom Title' {
    search.fs_uuid 848acb77-de99-4288-a62b-2bf9d7fbd643 root hd0,gpt2
    set prefix=($root)'/boot/grub'
    configfile $prefix/grub.cfg
}

Of course you shouldn't mix architectures like i386/ia32 with x64/amd64 or x64/amd64 with x64-efi/amd64-efi. Speaking of EFI, with EFI it's even simpler, as every bootloader should use it's own directory to not overwrite each other anymore.

On MBR installations you should make sure that only one system is able to update the MBR, see odfred's answer on how to do that. But it shouldn't be much of an issue when you can jump from one config to the other.

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LiveWireBT
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