Double checking grub-install ??

William Case billlinux at rogers.com
Thu Jun 26 14:28:20 UTC 2008


Thanks for replying Tim;

On Thu, 2008-06-26 at 16:05 +0930, Tim wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-06-25 at 14:15 -0400, William Case wrote:
> > I have to run fixmbr on my WindowsXP harddisk (sda).  I assume this
> > use of fixmbr will blow away my grub.
> 
> It will change the master boot record to suit Windows.  If you'd
> previously put GRUB on there, you'd lose it.
> 
> I'm not sure that I see the point of running fixmbr, then doing
> something else to undo it.
> 
I was trying to avoid wasting peoples time with a long description.

When I first boot I get the Fedora grub splash screen/menu twice --
besides that everything else boots normally.

About four weeks ago my commercial boot loader was blown away by the
WindowsXP sp3 download and install.  Fine and good: that didn't surprise
me.

I just installed grub.  During a first attempt at a grub install I had
an ooops! So I just re-installed grub and everything seemed fine.
Because it was an oops and not a confusion, I didn't pay attention to
the mistake, so now a month later I have forgotten exactly what I did
wrong.  Besides I thought I had recovered.

About a week ago (I don't re-boot very often), I noticed the Fedora
grub splash screen appear for 1/2 second or less, then go blank and
pause for a second or two.  Then a new splash screen appeared and
everything progressed fine from there.  This occurs definitely during
the grub stage of bootup. 

I didn't do anything then because I was going to fresh install Fedora 9
with a new grub on the weekend.  Which I have done.  But the double
splash screen still appears.



> > after running fixmbr I will go to my Fedora rescue disk and do:
> > 
In the hopes that I can eliminate this double boot.

> > grub-install --root-directory=/boot /dev/sdb
> > 
> > That is; I want grub stage1 on the mbr of sda while I want stage2 on
> > sdb /boot.
> 

I will use the grub command as you have given me to see if I can find
where the problem is.

> Shouldn't really be necessary to do anything other than rewrite the MBR
> (you could that by backing it up with dd before any changes, then
> restoring it again the same way).
> 
> Running fixmbr should only affect the drive that Windows is on.  So the
> only thing lost will be the MBR, the rest of GRUB will be unchanged
> (stage2 will still be where it was before).  
> 
The problem is, I think I have two stage2s.

> When I've restored GRUB, I've done it this way:
> 
[snip]
> 
> That's just four commands.  Here's a copy and paste of the process on my
> computer, though I'm doing everything on drive zero, since there's only
> one disc in this box.
> 
> [tim at gonzales ~]$ su -
> Password: 
> [root at gonzales ~]# grub
> Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.
> 
>     GNU GRUB  version 0.97  (640K lower / 3072K upper memory)
> 
>  [ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported.  For the first word, TAB
>    lists possible command completions.  Anywhere else TAB lists the possible
>    completions of a device/filename.]
> 
> grub>  root (hd0,0) 
> root (hd0,1)
>  Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
> 
> grub>  setup (hd0)
>  setup (hd0)
>  Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... no
>  Checking if "/grub/stage1" exists... yes
>  Checking if "/grub/stage2" exists... yes
>  Checking if "/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes
>  Running "embed /grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)"...  23 sectors are embedded.
> succeeded
>  Running "install /grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+23 p (hd0,0)/grub/stage2 /grub/grub.conf"... succeeded
> Done.
> 
> grub> quit
> quit
> [root at gonzales ~]# 
> 
> NB:  Tabbing didn't work when I tried it.  But it has in the past.  I'm
> not sure if that's down to the terminal on Fedora 9, or something else.
> 

> 
-- 
Regards Bill;
Fedora 9, Gnome 2.22.2
Evo.2.22.2, Emacs 22.2.1




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