GRUB Question

[John Pierce]

OK, first things first.  You quoted a couple of snippets that were
someone else's post, cut my sig out please.

On 10/17/07, John Summerfield <debian at herakles.homelinux.org> wrote:
> John Pierce wrote:
> >> I read the thing for chainload and it seems you need:
> >> rootnoverify (hd1,0)
> >> makeactive
> >> boot
> >
> > Tried that one, got Error 8: Kernel must be loaded before booting.
> >
> >> It's trivial: I don't have one set up at present, but it's like this
> >> stanza booting Windows:
> >> title Windows XP Professional
> >>      rootnoverify (hd0,0)
> >>      chainloader (hd0,0)+1
> >
> > Tried this one, got Error 15: Invalid or unsupported executable format.
> >
> > I am going to re-read the info grub again and see if I can make heads
> > or tails of it.
> >
> I did tell you to translate. the fact that that's a working example from
> my laptop does not mean it works exactly as coded for yours.
>
I did translate as you suggested, I changed the necessary info to make
it suit my needs and did this from the grub line editor at boot time.
I tried various incarnations of that theme including omitting lines
completely and adding new ones.

> A skill you need to acquire is to boot with grub without a menu. Use the
> documentation to create a grub floppy or CD and learn to use it. You can
> then boot almost anything.
>
I posted to both this thread and a new post that I solved the problem
by placing the mandriva grub on /dev/sdb1 rather than the mbr of
/dev/sdb.  My menu option in the fedora menu.lst is as follows:

title Mandriva GRUB
        rootnoverify (hd1,0)
        makeactive
        chainloader +1

This makes the grub installed by mandriva load and present the menu
entries from it associated menu.lst located on  /dev/sdb1.

I am also going to tell you that unless you built your own version and
set some uncommon options it is not possible to call the grub that is
on a second drives mbr.  Just specifying rootnoverify (hd1)
makeactive
chainloader or chainloader +1
boot

will result in an exception being thrown.  From grubs own
documentation all of the examples of booting other os's indicate that
the alternative boot loaders are embedded in the first sector of the
boot partition.

I only asked the question originally because during the mandriva
install I allowed the installer to place grub on the sdb mbr, I setup
stanza to it with what I thought would have worked and it did not.
After all of the feedback, I concluded that it was not possible, so I
went into mandriva setup utility and had it reinstall the grub on
sdb1.

Despite my rant, thank you and everyone else for your input.  I always
find the fedora list helpful even when somewhat off topic.

I also subscribed to the grub2 dev list, as I did not see a link to
the grub-legacy list on the front page of the grub site.  When I posed
the question there I got a nice email informing me that I was
submitting to the grub 2 and not grub-legacy list, if I posted that on
the grub-legacy list the sender would gladly answer my question.  In
my opinion if he was going to bother typing, just answer the question.
 So be it.

-- 
John
Registered Linux User 263680, get counted at
http://counter.li.org