Upgrade procedure/advice: boot sector

Peter Boy pboy at barkhof.uni-bremen.de
Sat May 22 20:22:23 UTC 2004


Am Sa, den 22.05.2004 schrieb Don Levey um 19:37:
>         dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb
> 
> This seems to have worked.  However, the second hard drive does not
> appear to have a boot sector.  That is, when I try to boot from it I get
> messages saying that I am unable to do so (I'd get the exact message,
> but I need the old disk up right now so I can send this message...).
> 
[....]
> Should I:
> 1) Just boot to the Fedora CDs and run the upgrade?  Would this install
> the boot loader for me? Or...
> 2) Work harder at getting the new disk to boot first, and then do the
> upgrade?

I suppose, the latter is far the better way to proceed  :-)

If hda is still installed and it is booting your current RH9
installation, you should have a working grub configuration. You can
modify your current grub.conf to boot the system you copied to hdb. You
might copy the lines which currently boot RH9 on hda and modify all
occurences of hd(0,x) to hd(1,x). If the copy procedure went fine, you
should be able to boot your fall back system on hdb. You should alway be
able to install a grub on hda which boots a system on hdb. So you are on
the safe side.

You should spend some thoughts on a partitioning schema for the Fedora
installation which makes upgrades less painful. I use an alternate root
partition (sharing /boot, /home /usr/local and some other dirs) to
install a new version and then migrate the important configuration files
in /etc.

Peter







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