I give up on x86-64, its too busted.

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Sun, 16 Apr 2006, Gene Heskett wrote:

> Humm, I now have installed the 386 version of FC5, but I told it to put
> grub in the 1st sector of /dev/hda2, the partition named /boot.
>
> But there's no choice of booting anything but XP.  I guess this means I
> have to install it in the mbr of /dev/hda?
>
> In which case how do I install it, and whats the magic spell to put into
> grub.conf so I have a choice of what to boot?
>
> Running the rescue cd, and cd'd to /mnt/sysimage, with a shell, a
> "usr/local/sbin/grub-install /dev/hda"  gets me a message that it can't
> find grub in sbin.  Of course its not there, if booted normally it
> would be in /usr/sbin.
>
> Obviously there's something I'm doing wrong in trying to protect the XP
> install, but how can I fix it and boot the just installed i386 version
> of FC5?  I'd druther not have to go all the way thru another install
> just to move the grub stuff into the MBR.


You are fine with GRUB in /dev/hda2.  Now boot with a rescue disk and run
'fdisk /dev/hda'  Then enter 'a' to toggle the boot flag and then '2' to 
make /dev/hda2 bootable, then 'w' to write the partition table, then 
reboot.

Do *NOT* use the Windows disk manager to toggle the bootable flag!  Every 
time I tried that with Win2K, it would blow away my entire partition 
table.

I always thought it would be nice if when you selected /boot's partition 
for GRUB, the installer would make it bootable, but when I bugzilla'd the 
request it was shot down.

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs