[fedora-virt] P2V and grub bootloader

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Fri, May 01, 2009 at 08:12:23PM +0200, Dennis J. wrote:
> I'm actually using the same setup but I forgot to mount the /boot  
> partition. After doing that grub-install worked fine although I'm not 
> sure why I got the BIOS error message simply because /boot wasn't 
> mounted. Isn't the MBR written to the first sector of the disk and as a 
> result independent of any particular partition? Why would the mounting of 
> a partition have an influence on that? (Of course without the mount 
> grub's boot files get written to the wrong place but that doesn't explain 
> grub complaining about the device layout)

Well this is a question for a grub mailing list, but the basic reason
is because the boot sector needs to know on which partition the first
stage is located.  The boot sector is very limited and has access to
just BIOS disks and a simple MBR-based partition decoder.  Thus the
first stage must be on an MBR partition (not an LV) on a BIOS disk --
/boot or /dev/sda1 in this example.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines.  Boot with a
live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v