Re: Boot floppies of RC1 broken for VAIO laptop
On Sun, Dec 03, 2006 at 12:40:48AM +0100, Rainer Dorsch wrote:
>
> > Can it boot a grub-disk floppy?
> >
> > Can you burn a CD? Or, on that nice hdd, make a 256 MB (or 1 GB if its
> > a large disk) partition. Put the hd-media and the netinst.iso there
> > following the long-way instructions for the hd-media. Boot that
> > partition and you're away.
> >
> > Once things are installed, turn that partition into extra swap.
> >
>
> Doug,
>
> thanks for the reply. What is a grub-disk? I think all other steps sound
> promising (I could probably even use the partition used right now as swap).
>
A grub-disk is from the package grub-disk. It is a floppy image of, you
guessed it, a grub-disk. You can make one without this package on any
computer that has grub installed by following the directions in the grub
manual. The grub-disk image is just dd'd to a fresh floppy from any
computer where you have dd and the image file, i.e. you don't have to
have grub installed.
The grub disk itself is just the grub boot loader with a default
menu.lst that you can alter if you want. You don't have to choose from
only the menu, you can enter the grub command line and go from there.
Any boot loader, including grub, looks only at the blocks on a disk. It
knows nothing about raid or lvm. /boot can't be on lvm. The usual way
of dealing with this is to have one raid1 partition set for /boot and
another for lvm. This way both (all) disks in the raid1 array have the
same /boot layout. If you install grub the the MBR on both disks, you
can boot from either. You can get really fancy and put a boot line for
both /boot partitions in each menu.lst, however, my main board bios can
pop up a boot list where you choose which device to boot so I don't need
to get fancy.
This is the advantage of grub over lilo; you can change __at_boot_time__
what you boot and with what parameters (can be password protected).
Doug.
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