Upgrade procedure/advice: boot sector (with update)

[Peter Boy]

Am So, den 23.05.2004 schrieb Don Levey um 04:11:
> > 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.
> > 
> I need to think on this one a little more.
> The original intent was to use the second disk elsewhere, when things
> are complete.  Either that, or mirror the first one.

I considered your hdb copying action as a temporarily needed fallback
solution, just in case something is broken after the update to fedora.
So it should be OK if you can boot your hdb system from a grub,
installed on hda. If the new system is runing fine, you may discard your
backup system on hdb and use is otherwise.

> Well, anything that makes life less painful sounds like a good idea.  I
> do have a separate /boot partition, though I must confess to not being
> experienced enough to fully utilise it in such a situation.

That's a good starting point. Given the rather huge harddisks today you
should consider to have a separate /home directory, too. You may need at
a minimum 4 gb for the fedora root partition, the rest of the disc may 
be dedicated for /home (and /boot and swap, of course).
> 
> UPDATE:
> After what I previously wrote, I also tried grub-install, but that
> didn't seem to help at all. Since the first disk was the "master", I
> decided to just try to install the upgrade on the second (copy) disk. 
> This all seemed to go well, everything completed without error.  I first
> chose "Update boot loader config" but that didn't have any effect upon
> my (lack of) boot.  I reran the upgrade choosing "install new boot
> loader", but since there were no new kernel packages being installed the
> boot loader config was not changed.
> 
> It seems that, for whatever reason, I'm not getting anything placed in
> MBR.  That is, I'm not even getting a grub menu, just a request for a
> bootable floppy.

You should remember that your bios will boot from hda by default and
does not see any MBR von hdb. Sometimes you can switch the boot device
in the bios, otherwise you have to make a hardware switch (changing the
adapter positions of the harddisks).

Peter