On Mon, Jul 30, 2001 at 08:07:02PM -0400, Mike McGuire wrote:
> So, as I see it, those of us with the problem are stuck booting from
> floppies unless they've got some other working install, and waiting
> for someone who knows better to figure out what's going on. Joy. :-/
I see in another post that you figured this out, but I just wanted to
share an alternate POV:
Yesterday I was messing around with my laptop, and after installing an
OS from a certain company in Redmond WA I realised that by LILO boot
block in the MBR had been overwritten. Fortunately I do have a
desktop system as well, so I installed grub and grub-doc, and created
a grub boot floppy. This allows me to boot any OS installed on the
machine, even any kernel! grub has command line completion, so the
hard part is figuring out which partition to boot :)
For example, my debian install on my laptop is in /dev/hda6 ... after
booting with the grub floppy I'm staring at the grub prompt:
grub> root (hd0,5)
grub starts counting with '0', so hdo is hda, and partition 5 is hda6.
grub responds ...
Filesytem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
So far, so good.
Now, I need to find a bootable kernel ... mine are in /boot, so I
start typing:
grub> kernel /boot/vmlinuz
At this point I hit the tab key. grub responds with
Possible files are: vmlinuz-2.2.18 vmlinuz-2.4.7
Cool. I wanted 2.4.7, so that's what I entered, along with any needed
kernel options
grub> kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.7 root=/dev/hda6
grub responds:
[Linux-bzImage, setup=0x1200, size=0xce346]
Almost there:
grub> boot
And I see:
Uncompressing Linux ...
I find this very handy as long as a bootable kernel exists on the
target drive. You still need a kernel-on-a-floppy for dire
emergencies, but for more vanilla emergencies this is a lot handier.
HTH,
--
Nathan Norman - Staff Engineer | A good plan today is better
Micromuse Ltd. | than a perfect plan tomorrow.
mailto:nnorman@micromuse.com | -- Patton
Attachment:
pgp_nKeTuI0K0.pgp
Description: PGP signature