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

[Dennis Veatch]

On Friday 27 January 2006 23:26, Dennis Veatch wrote:
> 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.

Well, isn't that special. That's right I got the church lady on this now. :)
Had the ol' hag setup /dev/hda with /boot part of / and run through the 
install choosing grub. And wadya know. It worked. 

So the problem I've been having is with /boot as it's own partition. So making 
use of the "feature". Defore the install asks for bootloader. Made that 
symlink in /mnt/boot/ and tried it, didn't work. :( Might be the way the 
installer code handles that, dunno for sure didn't look.

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