# Grub Installation

Here we are gonna learn how to install grub from both Windows and Linux. Please note that it is recommended to know how to use terminal or CMD and basic knowledge of partition in order to install grub. If you don't know how, consider switching to Grub2Win.

If your in Linux theres a high chance that grub-install is already there. If your in windows, well you can tell the Linux users "Lazy". Goto to this and download the packages that end with windows.zip.

Before we proceed to install grub we need to prepare a location for grub to be installed. The partition where grub is going to be installed is needed to be mounted. For windows it needs to be mounted with letter and for Linux it's a directory

For windows the partition is usually mounted unless its a special partition like EFI Partition. To mount the partition if its not mounted press Winkey + R to start run. There type diskmgmt.msc and hit OK.

Now a window will pop up and show all the disks and partition after loading. Right click the desired partition and select assign letter. Here we will assign the epic letter Z

For Linux if its not EFI partition or root partition, in most cases it needs to be mounted. Suppose we want to mount the partition sda1 on /mnt/grub. Now open up terminal and type these command.

sudo su
mkdir /mnt/grub
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/grub

And thats it!

Now the installation process for both windows and Linux is almost the same. You just need to specify installation target differently and also specify your firmware is legacy or UEFI. Suppose we want to install grub under boot folder on the target partition and. Now start terminal or CMD as administrator and type one of the commands according to your system.

Note: Index of drives can be found in diskmgmt.msc for windows

To install grub on our first disk which is disk 0 according to diskmgmt.msc we need to specify disk as \\?\PhysicalDrive0

#For installing as Legacy system on disk0
grub-install.exe  \\?\PhysicalDrive0 --target=i386-pc --boot-directory=Z:\boot

#For installing as UEFI 32bit system on disk0
grub-install.exe  \\?\PhysicalDrive0 --target=i386-efi --boot-directory=Z:\boot --efi-directory=A:\

#For installing as UEFI 32bit system on disk0
grub-install.exe  \\?\PhysicalDrive0 --target=x86_64-efi --boot-directory=Z:\boot --efi-directory=A:\

#For installing as Legacy system on disk0 which is USB 
grub-install.exe  \\?\PhysicalDrive0 --target=i386-pc --boot-directory=Z:\boot --removable

#For installing as UEFI 32bit system on disk0 which is USB 
grub-install.exe  \\?\PhysicalDrive0 --target=i386-efi --boot-directory=Z:\boot --efi-directory=A:\ --removable

#For installing as UEFI 64bit system on disk0 which is USB 
grub-install.exe  \\?\PhysicalDrive0 --target=x86_64-efi --boot-directory=Z:\boot --efi-directory=A:\ --removable

Note: Here A:\ is the EFI partition of the disk

To install grub on our first disk which is disk 0 we need to specify disk as /dev/sda

#For installing as Legacy system on disk0
grub-install  /dev/sda --target=i386-pc --boot-directory=/mnt/grub/boot

#For installing as UEFI 32bit system on disk0
grub-install  /dev/sda --target=i386-efi --boot-directory=/mnt/grub/boot -efi-directory=/boot/efi

#For installing as UEFI 64bit system on disk0
grub-install  /dev/sda --target=x86_64-efi --boot-directory=/mnt/grub/boott -efi-directory=/boot/efi

#For installing as Legacy system on disk0 which is USB 
grub-install  /dev/sda --target=i386-pc --boot-directory=/mnt/grub/boot --removable

#For installing as UEFI 32bit system on disk0 which is USB 
grub-install  /dev/sda --target=i386-efi --boot-directory=/mnt/grub/boott -efi-directory=/mnt/grub --removable

#For installing as UEFI 64bit system on disk0 which is USB 
grub-install /dev/sda --target=x86_64-efi --boot-directory=/mnt/grub/boott -efi-directory=/mnt/grub --removable

Note:

1. Here /mnt/grub is the EFI partition of the disk. In case if its installed on same disk as where Linux is, it is usually mounted on /boot/efi

2. i386-pc for legacy system, i386-efi for 32bit EFI system, x86_64-efi for 64bit EFI system. If the target partition is removable drive like USB, add --removable.

3. Index of drives can be found in diskmgmt.msc in start menu for windows

And thats it! We have successfully installed grub. But by default grub doesn't generate any configuration file. This file is easy to generate in Linux but not so in windows(Lazy). On next page, we will learn how to configure grub configuration file. Now if you try to boot grub, it will stop at grub shell if installation was successful. Else it will stop at grub-rescue shell which has only some basic functionality to fix and reach the shell.