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According to Wikipedia, LILO used to be the default boot loader for most Linux installs, and could boot Windows. Grub, however, can't boot windows directly, but rather calls the Windows boot loader, which then boots Windows.

My question is this: why did they take away the ability to boot directly to Windows from GRUB? It's not the end of the world having to go through two boot loaders, but it still seems like a regression.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LILO_(boot_loader)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_boot_loaders (This indicates that LILO boots to windows and linux)

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Grub 2 (not Grub Legacy) can boot Windows directly if you mean directly launching the ntldr without loading the partition boot sector:

insmod part_msdos
insmod ntldr
root=(hd0,n) # replace n with your partition
ntldr ($root)/ntldr
boot

Both versions of Grub may chainload the partition boot record (which then loads ntldr):

root=(hd0,n)
chainloader +1
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  • Since Vista bootmgr is used instead of ntldr
    – phuclv
    Jul 16, 2017 at 5:05
  • Yes the above equally applies to bootmgr too.
    – starfry
    Jul 16, 2017 at 12:46
  • the line ntldr ($root)/ntldr in your code won't apply for bootmgr
    – phuclv
    Jul 10, 2018 at 6:14

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