Dual booting with CDROM?

[J2R]

I'm installing Ubuntu onto a machine which has Windows 2000 on it, to allow dual boot. The machine functions as a server, though, and has no keyboard, mouse or monitor (or at least won't have after I've finished the install!). What I want is to have the situation where if a specific CD is in the drive, it boots into one OS, otherwise it boots into the other. This is to make it simple for users - all they have to do is to stick the CD in the drive, reboot and they're in the other OS. How do I go about doing this? How do I configure a boot CD like this?

[ronparent]

If your bios is set to boot first to a cd, if present, then what you want will occur naturally with the ubuntu live cd. Just download the iso image from the ubustu site and burn it to the cd.

[J2R]

Won't this just boot the live CD? That's not what I want. I want the presence of the requisite CD in the drive to ensure that the Ubuntu installation on the second partition on my hard drive boots.

[dandnsmith]

One way would be to build yourself a CD which boots grub, and has a grub configuration to boot the Ubuntu installation.

This is slightly more difficult than a grub boot CD which needs to be hand-driven to tell it what to do.

[J2R]

Thanks, I'll take a look at grub boot CDs. I suppose what would be most flexible is if grub could look at a file on the first partition to determine what to boot - as opposed to burning this info to the CD.

[J2R]

[accidental repeat post removed]