William L. Maltby wrote: > On Fri, 2008-08-29 at 13:58 -0400, Mark Belanger wrote: >> Given that I have a machine with possibly multiple disks, each of >> which is bootable(has an MBR).... >> >> Is there a command that will query the BIOS and tell me which disk >> is the default boot disk. BTW - this is x86. >> >> The goal is to remotely reboot the workstation into the desired >> disk(which contain different centos versions). > > Having said all that, why do you want to do it that way? It's much > better (and easier for you to accomplish your stated goal) by setting up > a single (and a backup, *maybe* - there's a couple more tricks needed > for that if using LVM) boot partition that loads and handles the > differences you need to support. Make your boot partition(s) larger, if > needed, to support multiple versions of kernels, initrd, config.* and > system maps. The using the "default" command of grub you can point to a > boot configuration that will load different kernels, pass different > initrds, mount different roots and even load different OSs (see the > "chain" descriptions in "info grub"). Thanks for the info - very detailed. I'm trying to find a one-size-fits-all method that is grub based. We have many different configurations here so I want something that can work with any of them. So far, the best thing I've seen is sfdisk -l which will show me bootable partitions. In a pinch, I could mount all the bootably parts and scriptify the altering of grub.conf -Mark -- Mark Belanger LTX Corporation