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Re: GRUB woes (install to hde)



On Wed, 28 Sep 2005 20:20:24 -0400
Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca> wrote:

> Hi folks,
> 
> following up on several earlier threads, including one of my own --
> 
> I'm trying desperately to install grub on an auxiliary hard drive
> currently living on the 3rd IDE bus (/dev/hde).  This is part of a
> scheme to do a mass debian install based on disk images...  but for now,
> the important thing is that I can't seem to install grub to this
> location.  

Putting this together with:

> /dev/hde does not have any corresponding BIOS drive.

If your 3rd IDE bus is supplied by an added card, then the drive stuff
is handled automagically by the card and the bios does not know about
it. 

Which could be a problem for grub?

I have seen motherboards with more than 2 IDE buses that fully support
those buses in the bios, but that seems to be a rare occurrence. More
commonly it seems the additional support is handled the same way as if
you had a seprate controller card.

Since the message is from a chrooted environment and the messages from
the non chrooted environment are different it could be something else,
but I find it a bit suspicious.

If your disk image was created from something other than /dev/hde and
the disk you are writing the image to is /dev/hde then chrooting and
attempting to write the mbr from the chrooted environment will be
problematic anyway.

If the disk you created the image from was /dev/hda then you write that
to a drive that is /dev/hde, then move that drive to it's destination
system where it is /dev/hda it should be bootable assuming the
correct drivers needed to boot the system are built into the kernel or
are available in the initrd image. 

The information about the physical location of the drive the way it is
set up in the image has to match what it will be in the target system
otherwise you will have to edit /etc/fstab and do the grub stuff after
the fact.

If the physical location of the drive will be different in different
target machines and you want to use the same disk image you probably
should look into the process for backing up and restoring he MBR and
keep and image of the MBR and a copy of /etc/fstab that matches what
will be the case for the different target installations and then copy
those into place after the disk image is written to the disk.

Later, Seeker



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