Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote:
William Ballard wrote:Whenever Lilo used to mess up with Woody, I'd: 1) Boot from the Woody CD. 2) Mount my existing single Debian partition as / 3) Execute a shell 4) Make sure /vmlinuz and /vmlinuz-old pointed to the right places in /boot. 5) Exit the shell. 6) Run "make system bootable." which would Lilo it up. Today I horked my Sarge Grub install, booted from the Sarge CD, screwed up my paritions when I tried to do (2) (because creating, formatting, and mounting partitions is all connected), verified 4) was correct, couldn't figure out how to do 6), and running "upgrade-grub" from within a chroot didn't work. When I entered "partition my disks," formatting my swap part was already highlighed. I picked my big Debian ReiserFS part and told it not to format it, but to mount it as /, and clicked Finish. D-I told me it was going to make changes to my partition table, even though I didn't tell it to change any partitions. Somehow when it was done my swap part was gone. In Sarge D-I, how can I just mount something as / without changingpart tables or formatting anything, and run the "make system bootable" step to recover from botched grub?Or how can I do it from within a chroot. I don't usually keep a second install of Debian around to chroot from, so I'd have to chroot from the Sarge emergency shell or (less desirably) a Knoppix CD. For now I just reinstalled the OS. It takes me 30 minutes with scripts. But I looked like a tool having to do that.What does "30 minutes with scripts" mean?I guess you ended up with a partition that can't be booted by either Lilo or Grub. So I am still a Lilo fan, I modified Lilo's mkrescue to create an iso that is a little more descriptive than "linux" and I keep that around, *always* when using d-i. Because it does grub natively I just let it do grub and use the lilo-rescue to set lilo straight again.My take on grub vs. lilo from a while ago was that if lilo does me good, keep it.H.
I'm trying to understand Grub as well. I finally found out how to make a boot disk from the FAQ (see link). The Grub project calls this the "legacy" version (0.9x).
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub-legacy-faq.en.html The relavent Q&A is: 4. How to create a GRUB boot floppy with the menu interface? 1. Create a filesystem in your floppy disk (e.g. mke2fs /dev/fd0). 2. Mount the floppy on somewhere, say, /mnt.3. Copy the GRUB images to the directory /mnt/boot/grub. Only stage1, stage2 and menu.lst are necessary. You may not copy *stage1_5.
4. Unmount the floppy.5. Run the following commands (note that the executable grub may reside in a different directory in your system, for example, /usr/sbin):
/sbin/grub --batch --device-map=/dev/null <<EOF device (fd0) /dev/fd0 root (fd0) setup (fd0) quit EOFI tried the result, and it worked. My take is that this won't "fix" anything that breaks, and there must be a working Grub install on the HD to get the files from.
Jim