Re: Booting Caper.
"Jonathan Lassoff" <jlassoff@sbcglobal.net> writes:
> I want to boot the debian woody install on the second drive, and have been
> with a boot floppy for a few months now.
[...]
> Well the original disk reprted all kinds of bad sectors while
> writing it, so I found a floppy that works, and it still fails to
> boot.
How are you making the boot floppy? I'd probably try to do this sort
of thing by using a real bootloader...
> So then I thought I might have my first go at using GRUB on the
> command line. So I boot into my Redhat 9 install and switch to
> single user mode (init 1) and run grub. I set the root partition and
> specify my kernel with all the right options. Then I specify my
> initrd image and then run "boot" and the thing just just quits, it
> doesn't boot or do anything.
Well, yeah, you've already booted the machine, the command-line grub
isn't going to magically reboot your running kernel. You need to
install grub on to some media (your hard disk or your known-good
floppy) and boot from that, then this incantation would work. Read
the GRUB manual.
(I find a GRUB floppy to be a great rescue tool, BTW: if you have some
clue of what's on the machine, you can use it to boot even if your MBR
is broken, you can boot from partitions that the local boot loader
doesn't know about, and if your system is really hosed, you can
connect a null-modem cable to another machine, tell GRUB to use a
serial console, and start catting files from the GRUB prompt. Not
that I've had flaky hardware that requires this or anything. :-)
...so my recommendation would be to follow the procedure in the GRUB
manual, and make a GRUB floppy, and either use that to boot your
Debian partition or use it to install GRUB into your MBR.
--
David Maze dmaze@debian.org http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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