How to find out where grub is installed?

Andras Simon szajmi at gmail.com
Sun Jan 18 00:43:40 UTC 2009


On 1/18/09, Mikkel L. Ellertson <mikkel at infinity-ltd.com> wrote:
> Andras Simon wrote:
>>
>> But if grub is in the MBR, how can it read grub.conf from /dev/sda2?
>> I'm sorry if my complete lack of understanding shines through...
>>
>> In any case: how do I install the "missing" grubs so that I end
>> up with one in the MBR and one in the /boot partition of each
>> version of Fedora? I assume that the installer will give me
>> one choice (MBR or /boot).
>>
>> Andras
>>
> There is more then one part to Grub. The first part (stage 1) is a
> small loader program that uses the BIOS to load the next part. It is
> dumb, so it only know the physical location on the disk of the next
> part, and it gets lost if you move it. The next part is usually
> stage 1.5, and it know how to read one type of file system. You use
> different stage 1.5 depending on the type of file system the grub
> directory is on. Stage 1.5 then loads stage 2, and handles thigs
> like loading the config file...

Thanks for the explanation!

> When you are using more then one copy of Grub, you normally install
> the primary copy stage 1 in the MBR. You add chainload commands as
> menu entries to load the other Grub installations. The stage 1 for
> those installations are normally installed on the boot record of the
> /boot partition that has the files for that copy of Grub.

The question is, how do I get to this blessed state... I'm looking at

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f10/en_US/ch-bootloader.html#sn-bootloader-config-change
and
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f10/en_US/sn-bootloader-others.html

and it's not quite clear how does one install grub both in the already
and the newly installed Fedora's /boot partition. My optimistic
reading of the second link above is that I'll end up with a newly
installed (in MBR) grub that will be configured to be able to boot the
old Fedora. Not as nice as the one grub per Fedora version plus one
that can chainload these.

I'm also looking at grub's documentation, but the relevant chapter
(Installing GRUB using grub-install) is pretty scary.

Andras




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