Re: grub floppy fails to boot

[brownh@hartford-hwp.com (Haines Brown)]

> Haines Brown wrote:
> > The object is to boot a new installation of debian sarge, filesystem
> > reiserfs, from a grub (0.95+cvs20040624-8) boot loader installed on a
> > diskette. Grub has not yet been installed on the target disk because I
> > want the security of a boot floppy in case it gums things up when I do
> > install it (I assume that a grub boot floppy does not need to have
> > grub installed on the hard disk).
> 
> Reiserfs is a module and you need to have grub load the initrd that goes
> with your kernel.

Joey,

I incorrectly assumed that the 2.6.7 kernel had the reiserfs module
included, for the 2.4.18-bf2.4 did. I stand corrected, thanks.

There's an initrd.img symlink on my target disk / partition that
points to /boot/initrd-2.6.7-1-386.img, and so I assumed that all I
needed was a grub stanza line such as: 

	initrd /initrd.img

No luck. The boot failed. Grub reports: 

   ...
   initrd /initrd.img
   Error 15: File not found

I tried various things without luck, including 

  initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.7-1-386.img

I decided to install grub on the target hard disk MBR and create a
grub boot diskette from it (I can mount the target HD for some reason
from the grub bootloader in the MBR of my principal running
disk). Although I confirmed that grub was installed/configured on the
target HD, it had failed to create the /boot/grub subdirectory, and so
stage1, stage2 and menu.lst were not available for the creation a grub
boot floppy.

When I created that grub subdirectory and copied the stage1 and stage2
files from target HD /lib/boot/386-pc into it, only then could I run
#grub on the booted target HD to create a boot floppy: 

       grub> setup (fd0)
	     checking if "boot/grub/stage1" exists... yes 
	     checking if "boot/grub/stage2" exists... yes
	     Running "install /boot/grub/stage1 (fd0)
			      /boot/grub/stage2 (fd0) p
			      /boot/grub/menu.lst"... suceeded
	     Done

However, it lied. There was no /boot/grub/menu.lst file on the
floppy. It seems that that grub installation on the target HD failed
to create the grub subdirectory on the floppy and put stage1 and
stage2 into it and create a menu.lst, just as it had failed to do so
on the target HD. I assume this is why I could not then create a grub
boot floppy from my target system. 

Incidentally, is the "p" in the fifth line above significant?

Haines Brown