Re: Grub can't boot hda1 (vfat/diagnostics), need to do something from DOS?

[Joel Roth <joelz@pobox.com>]

On Thu, Jan 01, 2009 at 09:25:55AM +0100, Sven Joachim wrote:
> On 2009-01-01 05:51 +0100, A. F. Cano wrote:
> 
> > On a brand new HD, I made a small partition (32M) exactly like the one
> > on the old disk.  Copied (with tar) the contents as the drive was
> > mounted from a usb carrier.  Then I moved it to the main drive caddy
> > and installed Lenny in the rest of the drive.  Grub recognized the
> > vfat partition (the bootable flag is set) and created the necessary
> > entry in the boot menu, but when selected at boot time I get this:
> >
> > Booting Dell Diagnostics
> > root(hd0,0)
> > Filesystem type is fat, partition type 0x6
> > savedefault
> > makeactive
> > chainloader + 1
> > This is not a bootable disk, Please mount a bootable floppy and 
> > press any key to try again...
> >
> > Do I need to run something from DOS?  What am I missing?
> 
> You must install the DOS bootloader with the "sys" command.
> 
> Sven

I believe the DOS bootloader will simply overwrite GRUB,
which resides in the boot sector of the disk, having
no effect on the properties of the first partition.

What I would suggest is that you recopy the original
partition byte-for-byte using dd. For example, if
the source for Dell Diagnostics were /dev/hda1 and the target /dev/sda1,
you would type:

	dd if=/dev/hda1 /dev/sda1

You need to make sure /dev/sda1 is as large or
larger than /dev/sda1.

I think GRUB can boot a partition regardless of the status
of the bootable flag. 

Good luck (and successful partition copying!)

Joel
-- 
Joel Roth