Grub stage1 file error

[Michael Schwendt]

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On Sun, 05 Oct 2003 23:30:15 -0400, Robert L Cochran wrote:

> Say, try 
> to assign mount points to a FAT16 partition. But where will I put \ if I 
> have a FAT16 partition taking up the whole disk and I need \boot to be 
> the first partition?

Who says there is only a single FAT16 partition on the disk?
And why \ and \boot instead of / and /boot?

> And where is swap going to live?

On any partition the user marks as becoming the swap partition.

> If you activate swap, that formats it.

"mkswap" doesn't complain when being fed with a FAT16 partition.
A partition is a partition. It doesn't matter what you store in
it.

> I don't think the installer lets you continue the installation process 
> unless you have /boot, /, and swap at a minimum.

/boot is optional. I'm not sure about swap right now. I think it's
optional, too.

> But most FAT16 partitions take up the entire physical drive.

Hmmm... most Windows users have lots of logical drives, because they
have lots of separate partitions on multiple drives. That's my own
experience. YMMV.

> You very quickly find 
> yourself forced to partition as part of the installation process. And if 
> you do that with disk druid, FAT16 is not one of the available partition 
> types.

You can assign _existing_ partitions to mount points. The installer
does not force you to repartition the drive.

> But let's suppose you somehow have 3 FAT16 partitions on a drive or on 3 
> separate drives in the system. Does the installer mount them as FAT16 or 
> ext3? I don't know.

ext3, of course, because the partition gets formatted as ext3. Unless
the user forces the installer to skip the formatting. mke2fs doesn't
complain when it is passed a FAT16 partition.

> I don't know how you can actually write data to a 
> partition not supported by the installer.

A partition is a partition. The file-system on it is a separate
concept.

> Correct me if I'm wrong: you go into fdisk, change a partition type to 
> x'83', Linux ext3, write the change to the partition table, and what is 
> the next step?

None. You're done.

> I've done this several times and I think you have to 
> format the partition. 

Why? Do you reformat your partitions when you toggle the "bootable" or
"hidden" flag? The steps you describe apply to an unformatted disk.

> How else can you get your inodes and journalling done?

The user has created the ext3 file-system already when he installed
Fedora.

> Are you saying that you can just change a partition type from FAT16 to 
> ext3 and, without formatting it, 

Exactly.

> get Grub to work with it?

No time to read the GRUB source code, but I *assume* it then accesses
the partition with its ext2 fs support module, whereas if the
partition is FAT16 it would use the VFAT driver.

> More information from the user will help pinpoint the issue. The user 
> did not post very much detail to start with and didn't really give 
> enough detail subsequently.

But of course. He wrote, fdisk says the partition is FAT16, parted
says its ext3. fdisk examines the partition type, parted examines the
file-system type.

- -- 
Michael, who doesn't reply to top posts and complete quotes anymore.

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