more grubbiness (was Re: 1.6.0-i686-rc2)

[Dennis Veatch]

On Thursday 26 January 2006 23:08, Dennis Veatch wrote:
> On Thursday 26 January 2006 20:05, Auke Kok wrote:
> > Dennis Veatch wrote:
> > >Now this was done on a drive that had been low level formatted so I know
> > > there was no cruft in the MBR from previous installs. So obviously even
> > > though the install procedure *thinks* grub wrote to the MBR, grub for
> > > whatever reason did not.
> >
> > tomorrow I'm gonna run grub tests and see if I can fix the grub code -
> > even the lilo code has a flaw atm so this is the only thing I want to
> > fix before it becomes -final. I'll spend some time on the grub code thus
> > soon in a productive and nice testing environment ;^)
> >
> > Auke
>
> Poking around a bit more.
>
> If I understand some of grub correctly. The um, correct procedure is
> "grub-install hd0", then "grub", "root (hdX,X), setup (hd0) and quit. Then
> fiddle with the menu.lst. Well actually "setup" is more or less doing the
> samething as "grub-install" if I got that right.
>
> Anyway. Starting from scratch again on the all scsi box (low level format).
> I've run through all the install procedure and dropped to shell. So I run
> "grub" and doing "root (hd0,2)" does find the correct filesystem and
> partition types.
>
> Running "setup (hd0)" of course cannot find stage1 in "/boot/grub" or
> "/grub". So I try "find /mnt/boot/grub/stage1" and "file not found". Hmm.
> Oh, ah /boot is on it's own partition (ext2).
>
> Also during the install and choosing grub, I did see on the following
> screen ;
>
> grub> setup (hd0)
>  Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... no
>  Checking if "/grub/stage1" exists... no
>
> Error 15: File not found
>
> Another box here with a similar partitioning scheme. Running grub, then
> root (hd0,2) gets it right but setup (hd0) gives the same error as on the
> above system. Tried deleting /boot/grub then running grub, umounting and
> fsck, run grub-install then grub all with the same symptom above.
>
> Downgraded grub all the way back to 0-95, no change. Something goofy going
> on.

Well hmm. Seems that bit about "find" barfing with a file not found is not a 
bug, script error, etc. But rather as this document describes it, a "feature" 
as noted in Section 11;

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub-faq.html#q8

So I did the symlink thing they note and lo, find reported;

grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
 (hd0,0)

The setup command still errors out I guess cause I don't have the "/boot/boot" 
thing. I don't have any boxes with /boot in the / partition, so I guess 
theres still the question of that.

That's all I'm doing tonight though. It's late and me go ZZzzzzzz.

-- 
You can tuna piano but you can't tune a fish.