Grub disk: something automatic?
Dotan Cohen
dotancohen at gmail.com
Thu Jan 28 15:48:30 UTC 2010
> Hi Dotan, sorry I do not have an exact answer for you, but here are some
> suggestions to help with your situation. Multiple hard drives can be a
> pain on modern Motherboards, because the Mobo can re-assign drive
> numbering on boot, (if you boot from CD-ROM on one controller then
> switch to a SATA hd on another controller, drive numbering between your
> IDE and SATA hard drives will be completed messed up. Here are some
> strategies to alleviate the headaches:
>
> 1. If possible, arrange your hard drives so your primary linux partition
> is on your boot hard drives. When bootstrapping grub, disconnect the
> other hard drives. It's impossible for even grub to mix up the hard
> drive numbering when there is only hd0. It will not matter how badly
> device.map is inaccurate on future update-grub runs, since grub will now
> auto-fix itself based on UUID's.. (I'm really loving this new feature.)
>
> 2. Install grub on the super-block of your filesystem as well as the
> mbr. (this won't work with XFS filesystem, since XFS does not leave
> space on the superblock)
>
> ex: grub-install /dev/sda1
>
> Then mark that partition as bootable in your partition editor.
>
> That way, whenever another OS or disk utility messes your MBR, *any*
> bootloader or repair disk will be able to chainload your grub that is
> safely installed on the partition. From the lowly dos fdisk /mbr (or
> lilo -m /dev/sda) to simply install an old style dos MBR will be enough
> to get your linux booting again.
>
> While reading the grub documentation, I also saw reference that grub can
> now create it's very own boot partition to deal with these musical hard
> drive situations, which should be more reliable. I haven't tested this
> myself yet (on to-do list) so can't offer guidance, but it's worth
> perusing the grub documentation wiki.
>
Thanks. I do try to keep my bootable partitions (and swap) on sda
whenever I can. I like the idea about copying grub to sda as well,
that looks handy.
Thanks.
--
Dotan Cohen
http://what-is-what.com
http://gibberish.co.il
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