[CentOS] Grub configuration from within Windows

[Brian Mathis]

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 5:58 PM, Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com> wrote:
> My friend uses a typical dual-boot setup (Windows XP and Centos 5.3).
> The machine is online 24/7 and he often uses it from a remote location
> (Linux via ssh -X, Windows via rdesktop).
>
> The problem is that he wants to be able to remotely configure which of
> these two OSes is to be the default on next reboot, so he can switch
> from one OS to the other and back remotely. If Linux is up, he just
> needs to reconfigure grub.conf, but if Windows is up (and default) he
> has no way of accessing grub.conf.
>
> Now, he has several partitions on the drive, some ntfs, some vfat and
> some ext3. Is there a clean way of putting grub.conf on a vfat
> partition? Is there a way for Windows to have rw access to ext3
> filesystem (namely, /)? Is there some other way of handling this
> without physical access to the machine while it boots?
>
> I have suggested virtualization of Windows, so he could run them both
> concurrently without pain, but for certain (computational performance)
> reasons that is not a good option for him --- he wants hard reboots
> between OSes.
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> Thanks! :-)
> Marko
>

I have not done this, but maybe a small vfat partition with syslinux
instead of grub as the boot loader.  Then you could edit the
configuration from both Windows and Linux.

It might also be a good idea for him to look into one of these
single-port IP/KVMs in case he needs to get to the console:
http://www.lantronix.com/it-management/kvm-over-ip/securelinx-spider.html