Hardy->Karmic booting locked-room mystery

[David Gerard]

2010/1/15 Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com>:
> On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 1:42 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2010/1/15 Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com>:

>>>  - learn to write the special magic config file in /etc/grub or
>>> somewhere that GRUB2 reads its info from and writes its own magic
>>> non-human-readable not-to-be-edited *real* config file

>> This is actually pretty easy - it generates a textual grub.conf as we know it!

> Hmph. OK. To quote Slartibartfast, "it may alarm you; it scares the
> willies out of me."
> I'd offer you a job but I think you've got one.


I have seriously touted professional abilities to fix broken Debians
based on running Ubuntu alphas. I discovered the textual nature of the
generated grub.conf when I was running 9.10 alpha, where having to
unbugger it by hand is to be expected.



>> The catch there is how to boot the Ubuntu partition at all. If I can
>> get that far, I'm fine.

> DOS boot floppy, LOADLIN?
> Add an entry to BOOT.INI?


For the moment I suspect I'll be using ext2fs to edit the generated
grub.conf to add a Windows boot entry, so the laptop is at least
usable. Actually booting the Ubuntu partition can then wait. This is
assuming no-one comes up with what to tell grub at boot to actually
Just Work.


- d.