Re: GRUB Mystery
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] ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: GRUB Mystery
On Monday 18 July 2005 08:39 pm, Jim Kuzdrall wrote: I can boot in from the floppy described below. If I boot choice 2 from the first scsi (my normal boot), it hangs after mounting /proc. I can see from the screen dump that it is loading Linux 2.4 modules from sda2, which won't work with 2.6. After many experiments: GRUB boots sdb (hd2) if GRUB is installed on any drive except sda (hd1). That is, it works on floppy, CDROM, ide drive hda (hd0). It must be some confusion between what GRUB expects and the BIOS drive ordering on the MSI K7D Master board. If anyone has problems with GRUB, the most helpful resource I found was Linux in a Nutshell, 4th Ed, page 510, Installing GRUB. Make the installation floppies as they suggest. Two types of floppies are suggested: 1) boots to GRUB command line interface; 2) boots to a regular GRUB selection menu. Use type 1 to GRUB in the MBR. I always had stage1, stage2, and grub.conf (also called menu.lst) in /boot/grub on the partition I wanted to boot. Perhaps the floppy will do that too; don't know. Jim ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: GRUB Mystery
On Monday 18 July 2005 11:57 pm, Bill McGonigle wrote: On Jul 18, 2005, at 20:39, Jim Kuzdrall wrote: I am running out of experiments to try. I've admitted to myself I'll never fully understand Grub. Every time I go back to it I wind up getting mixed up, figuring it out again, getting things working, then forgetting it. :) Either I'm too dumb or Grub is confusing. Then I haunt the Grub lists and the guys there are re-writing it and don't want to talk about Grub 1, since they're working on Grub 2, which doesn't and seemingly won't have many of the features of Grub 1. I feel better for having some company. My collection of GRUB articles and tips totals about 15 pages, not including the rather uninformative info pages. The articles often begin this is how GRUB works, but I can't find two that consistently agree. This is an instance where I am tempted to dig into the source code. I have a good guess what it is doing wrong, but I suspect the code is as poorly organized and documented as the product. And besides, I am fully occupied with my engineering tasks. When I retire... Is there is a common reason why code comments, info, man, and Microsoft manuals seldom give the needed answers? 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. Anyway, I am going to redo the whole installation to see if I missed anything in the SuSE setup. That shoots the morning at least. Jim ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: GRUB Mystery
On Jul 18, 2005, at 20:39, Jim Kuzdrall wrote: I am running out of experiments to try. I've admitted to myself I'll never fully understand Grub. Every time I go back to it I wind up getting mixed up, figuring it out again, getting things working, then forgetting it. :) Either I'm too dumb or Grub is confusing. Then I haunt the Grub lists and the guys there are re-writing it and don't want to talk about Grub 1, since they're working on Grub 2, which doesn't and seemingly won't have many of the features of Grub 1. Has anyone here played with gujin? It looks really nice: http://gujin.sourceforge.net/ Anyway, Jim, maybe it can find your SuSE disk. -Bill - Bill McGonigle, Owner Work: 603.448.4440 BFC Computing, LLC Home: 603.448.1668 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mobile: 603.252.2606 http://www.bfccomputing.com/Pager: 603.442.1833 AIM: wpmcgonigleText: [EMAIL PROTECTED] RSS: http://blog.bfccomputing.com/rss ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
