Upgrade procedure/advice: boot sector (with update)

[Don Levey]

On Sat, 2004-05-22 at 16:22, Peter Boy wrote:
> 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.
> 
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.

> 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

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.

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.

 -Don