Re: GRUB bootloader issue

[Alvin Oga <aoga@mail.Linux-Consulting.com>]

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005, H.S. wrote:

> Mike S wrote:
> > Did you mount /boot first?
> 
> umm, no, I don't recall so. I jotted down the steps I took and mounting
> /boot doesn't appear in those. My method worked properly on a laptop

*you* do NOT ( manually ) mount /boot or / or /usr or /var or /tmp or 
any other partition or directories

*the boot kernel* will mount what it needs when its ready to do
so by looking at the entries in /etc/fstab

/boot as a partition is NOT required on most machines if its
bios can handle booting from above 1024 cylinders
	- or boot from floppy or cdrom or usb or network to avoid the
	problem

if /boot is NOT defined in /etc/fstab, and you put your vmlinuz-2.6.x
kernel in /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.x, than your system will not boot properly

---- trick question ---- for more thinking about how it boots ----

	if /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.x is what you want to boot, but /boot needs
	to be mounted by vmlinuz-2.6.x, trick is which comes first ??

	- the boot loader ( lilo, grub, loadlin, .. ) and boot sequence
	"magically" figures it out for you before it turns control over
	to avoid this silly catch-22

	- this silly catch-22 is part of why grub needs to have its silly
	stage-1.5 filesystem dependent files for ext3 or xfs or reiserfs

c ya
alvin