News item 2009-11-10 - Koos van den Hout

Going old-school today: I wrote a sed script to massage grub.conf to add a windows partition on a second disk. Searching google for has this been done before yields loads of page with handholding on how to add windows by hand to a grub.conf generated by anaconda but no simple 'automated' solution. I am always in favor of letting the computer do the boring work. But a bit of thinking and testing and now sed does the job:

if [ -b /dev/sdb1 ]; then

        cp /boot/grub/grub.conf /boot/grub/grub.conf.pre

        sed -e 's/timeout=5/timeout=30/' -e '/hiddenmenu/a\
title Windows XP (Service Pack 3)\
        rootnoverify (hd1,0)\
        map (hd0) (hd1)\
        map (hd1) (hd0)\
        makeactive\
        chainloader (hd1,0)+1
' -e '/hiddenmenu/d' < /boot/grub/grub.conf.pre > /boot/grub/grub.conf
fi

Everybody knows sed -e 's/../../' but I had to look up 'insert', 'append' and 'delete'.
Update 2009-11-12: Changed insert to append because the previous version inserted windows multiple times with multiple linux kernels. Once is enough. Also moved it from the post-install instructions to the post-reboot script so linux is fully configured before windows gets booted.