On Jul 19 at 9:05am, Jim Kuzdrall wrote:
On Monday 18 July 2005 11:57 pm, Bill McGonigle wrote:
I've admitted to myself I'll never fully understand Grub.
I feel better for having some company.
I suspect the root cause for a good portion of the trouble surrounding boot
loaders is the horrible mess this part of the "modern" IBM-PC architecture is.
It was never that well designed in the first place, and it's been
re-implemented, extended, patched, broken, fixed, and broken again so many
times it's a wonder it works at all. It's pretty amazing that something that
should be so simple is so poorly done.
One deeply disturbing fact is that the kernel usually has no way of knowing
for sure how what it sees lines up with the BIOS's idea of things. So any
time you're manipulating partition tables or installing a boot loader from
within Linux, there's a fair amount of guesswork involved. Erk! :-(
(There's a relatively recent standard (I forget what it's called) that
allows a protected mode OS to interrogate the BIOS and figure out what is
what, but implementation is still fairly rare, as I understand it.)
This is why conventional GRUB wisdom says to always install GRUB from a
floppy, and to avoid /sbin/grub (and the "grub-install" shell-script) if at
all possible. If you boot from floppy, you're running in the BIOS environment
GRUB runs in, so you don't have to worry about BIOS-vs-kernel differences.
This is what I do, and it helps a lot.
Linux's approach of using relative drive identifiers (hda, hdb, etc.)
doesn't help, either. Ever time you move a drive (or tweak the BIOS boot
order), all your filesystem devices change! :-(
Maybe the authors should explain why you would want the option or feature
along with what it does. This is particularly true for code, which clearly
states what it does - posterity just wants to know why it was done.
Amen!
--
Ben <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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