Can I "dual boot" grub-efi and grub-pc?

Question

I am currently running Ubuntu with grub-efi and rEFIt on a Macbook (8,3).

I'd like to have the option to boot Ubuntu in BIOS emulation mode as well. Is this possible?

I guess I need grub-pc to write to the disk MBR (and hope that rEFIt will discover it), but I'm not sure if grub can handle bios and efi simultaneously. Please correct me if my assumptions are wrong.

I'm doing this because I've only been successful in enabling the integrated graphics in EFI mode, so I'd like to have external monitor support until I figure out how to enable the discrete chip. But that's a problem for another day.

Answer 1

Yes, you can install grub-pc to the MBR (or Linux partition), as well as grub-efi to the EFI system partition. rEFIt should detect and display those as separate boot options. The catch is that only one of grub-pc and grub-efi can be installed at the same time, but this isn't a major problem since you only need to install it once, and they use the same configuration (and so updating kernels isn't an issue).