Re: how do you check that grub2 is configured correctly ?

[Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com>]

On Thu, 15 Jul 2010 07:19:57 -0700, briand wrote:

> On Thu, 15 Jul 2010 07:13:52 +0000 (UTC) Camaleón wrote:
> 
>> Things than can prevent your system from booting are (but not limited
>> to): having a wrong root defined or pointing to a wrong/nonexistent
>> device.
> 
> and I would check this where ?  I looked at grub.cfg and it's quite
> complicated.

GRUB is complicated by definition. I mean, being a bootloader plenty of 
options, is not easy to understand how to deal with it. I'm using GRUB 
legacy for more that 6 years and still have to recheck the manual now and 
then when something goes wrong in order to refresh my brain :-)

>> There are still some things one have to manually check to assure a
>> correct booting but if the system fails to boot you can run GRUB
>> interactively. Also, as last resort, having a CD with SuperGrubDisk is
>> a must.
>> 
>> 
> Why don't you tell me what those things are , enquiring minds want to
> know ?!

I only know the inners of the GRUB legacy. On those days, one had only to 
care about:

- GRUB installation location (MBR / first boot sector of a partition)
- /boot/grub/device.map file (for a correct mapping devices between BIOS 
and GRUB)
- /boot/grub/menu.lst (GRUB menu file for booting different OSs)
- Check that GRUB installation files ("stage1" and "stage2) were not 
damaged/corrupted somehow
- /etc/grub.conf (global configuration file)

(location of these files can vary depending on the linux distribution in 
use)

And that was all.

Now, with GRUB2, some things remain the same, but some don't. For 
example, IIRC, GRUB2 nomenclature for devices now starts counting by "1" 
and not by "0", so the second partition of the first device is now 
designated as (hd1,2) and not (hd0,1).

Greetings,

-- 
Camaleón