[kwlug disc.] am I asking too much of grub?

[Steven Stillaway]

Usually, and I am not guaranteeing this, it is not really a problem  
with Grub per se, but it is a problem with BIOS's.

You have the USB key listed as hda and (hd0,0) -- this works and makes  
sense when you are setting up Grub.  However, when computers are  
actually booting the BIOS often does strange things and moves the  
order of the devices around.  Once and OS is loaded then your hda will  
actually become (hd0,0) but during the boot process it may not be.

Try from the grub shell that you end up in doing a find for / 
vmlinuz-2.6.25 and see where it says it is.  Also you may have to try  
re-installing grub into the MBR with options to explicitly tell it  
where to find its menu.lst file.  It can be a bit annoying but it also  
can be done.

Now the big problem is if you then move this USB key to a different  
system the BIOS order of the devices could be different and you could  
be screwed.

Basically PC BIOS is dumb.  Some day we will switch to EFI and things  
will be a lot nicer.

- Steven

On 21-Apr-08, at 9:44 PM, Chris Bruner wrote:

> I'm trying to boot off a usbkey using grub as my boot loader.
> I've gotten it to the point where it loads the stage2, but it can't  
> seem to understand the filesystem on the usbkey. (ext2)
>
> My system is configured as
> /dev/hda1   swap
> /dev/hda2   linux (ext2)
>
> sda1   linux (ext2)
>
> I've also given it space at the beginning of the usbkey to have the  
> grub stage 1 part, so the start block of the partition is 2 instead  
> of the normal 1.
>
> The grub menu.lst is
>
> Title RoboDev
> root (hd0,0)
> kernel (hd0,0)/vmlinuz-2.6.25 root=/dev/sda1 ro vga 773
>
> and so on
>
> Instead of the normal grub menu coming up, I get the grub command  
> prompt.
>
> It seems it doesn't even get to the menu.lst
> Trying to do a manual load of the config file and kernel is  
> similarly fruitless, but I am able to load the files from the hard  
> disk.
>
> Does anyone have any idea what could be wrong?
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> KWLUG-Disc mailing list
> KWLUG-Disc at kwlug.org
> http://listserv.kwlug.org/mailman/listinfo/kwlug-disc