Smart Boot Manager

Reading about the OS independent boot manager, SBM, it suggests that it would be able to boot multiple OS’s and was wondering if anyone has tried it with Endless. It says it detects GRUB,etc., and writes to a tiny portion of the MBR but not knowing about bios addressing,etc. I can’t say where and how endless uses GRUB and why linux will work and Endless wont (if indeed it doesn’t). So has anyone tried SBM to boot linux’s alongside Endless? Rather find out if it’s been tried before attempting it myself and maybe losing my boot. Thanks to anyone that can shed light on this.

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I have not tried SBM. The project as listed on Source Forge has not been updated since 2013. It resides in the hard drives MBR sector, so I assume it would not work at all with a GPT formatted disk and not work with a system that uses UEFI boot.

bill

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Thanks for the reply however I don’t have uefi nor gpt formatting so do you think it will work with the basic mbr format or would you have to try it to come to a conclusion? Thanks Brian

I would be concerned about it not being updated in a long while. That does not mean it does not work, but it might be very hard to find help if trouble was encountered. Pick the one reason you need a different boot manager and use that reason as a search term on your favorite engine. See what is most often used reason and go from there.

I have a UEFI booting laptop, with a GPT drive, so I would not be able to use this boot manager and have an opinion on it.

bill

Thanks for reply, as for the reason, I want to be able to choose between Endless, Win7 and Elive Linux. The Endless boot manager doesn’t allow this or if it does I don’t know how to configure it. I don’t care which boot manager I use, just thought SBM may be suitable. If you have any other suggestions on a suitable boot manager I would be grateful for the advice. Thanks Brian.

If you install with version 3.2.0.0 or newer of the Endless Installer for Windows you should actually be able to do this triple-boot. I recommend you install Elive Linux first, get that dual-booting with Windows, then install Endless OS.

  • On BIOS systems, you’ll have to select Windows from whatever menu (GRUB?) allows you to pick between Windows 7 and Elive Linux, then select Endless OS from the Windows boot menu
  • On EFI systems, you can use the firmware’s boot menu to choose between Endless OS (whose GRUB will allow you to pick Windows as well) and the Elive Linux bootloader (whatever it may be). In fact, on EFI systems this should always have been possible. You could edit Endless’s GRUB config (it’s in C:\endless\grub\grub.cfg) to add an entry for Elive Linux.