Re: Adding hard drive to a laptop

[cga2000 <cga2000@optonline.net>]

On Sun, Oct 21, 2007 at 11:21:56PM EDT, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 21, 2007 at 10:56:21PM -0400, cga2000 wrote:
>  
> > You're telling me this won't work because I need grub's stage 1 in the
> > boot sector, right?
> 
> I think that "won't work" is far too strong.  You can do this, but
> before you swap the drives around, after you have copied the data, put
> grub on the second drive while running on the first drive; but you have
> a choice to consider first.  If you just go with the standard grub
> menu.list, when you swap drives, it should find everything fine but I
> would print out your menu.list so that you have a record of it.  Then,
> when you boot the new drive and (hopefully) get grub, if it doesn't
> work, you can go to the grub command line and enter what you need.

As Jose Luis indicates I was missing one essential step .. namely that
before I can boot off of the new drive I need to write a few hundred
bytes of grub code, presumably to the "boot sector".  IIRC, something
called stage one of the boot loader, the stuff that loads stage two from
the hard drive .. which in turn reads menu.lst and so forth...   

Well .. at least that's what I vaguely remember reading in the lilo
manuals some five years ago .. 

I would imagine grub is similar in this respect.

So I guess I just need to find out some means of making grub install on
the new drive before I shut down the machine and swap the drives.

Or maybe boot with some system recovery disk and use whatever tool it
provides to initialize the new drive's boot sector.

Kinda makes sense.

> Having a second computer on which you can read the grub manual is very
> helpful.  Having a grub-disk to boot if necessary may also be helpful;
> making one ahead of time would be prudent.  See the grub-disk package if
> you can boot a floppy.

Thanks .. I followed your advice in an earlier thread and installed both
grub-disk and grub-doc.  

I'm  not worried though .. unless I do physical damage to the old drive
when swapping, I could always reinstall it as "hda" and fall back to my
current configuration.

Thanks,
cga