Re: Custom Grub-install on a Floppy
On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 9:13 AM, Martin McCormick
<martin@x.it.okstate.edu> wrote:
>
> I have a system that constantly reverts back to the
> wrong boot order and I need to monkey-wrench it to boot off
> CDROM so as to upgrade it to wheezy.
>
> As a computer user who happens to be blind, this is a
> major pain. Get the monitor. Find somebody to watch it and ask
> them to go in to CMOS setup and reorder the boot sequence and
> then save. If you only have to do that once per computer, it is
> tolerable but eventually, this otherwise functional computer
> won't boot off the CD and we have to do it all over again.
>
> I want to declare a truce and put a floppy in that will
> call the CD. I think this can be done but all the documentation
> I find is either very narrowly targetted or doesn't explain
> the why of grub-install well enough to figure out what to do.
>
> That is more or less where I am at this point.
>
> My questions are:
>
> Should this work?
> Where are some linear English sentences that de mystify what we
> can get grub-install to do?
grub-install has "--no-floppy" and "--allow-floppy" options so
installing grub to a floppy should be possible.
AFAIR, grub-install on BIOS hardware:
. populates DIR/grub from "/usr/lib/grub/i386-pc"
. invokes grub-mkimage to create core.img
. invokes grub-setup (or grub-bios-setup on wheezy) to install
boot.img and core.img in the MBR and the MBR gap respectively (or, in
the case of a GPT-labelled disk, the MBR and the bootbios partition).
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