Upgrading from Red Hat 9

[Phil Schaffner]

On Wed, 2004-02-18 at 14:14 -0500, Gene C. wrote:

> On Wednesday 18 February 2004 14:01, Paul Iadonisi wrote:
> > On Wed, 2004-02-18 at 13:43, Gene C. wrote:
> >
> > [snip]
> >
> > > What occurs to me is to somehow use grub.  The grub stage1 and stage2
> > > files are small enough to fit on a floppy.  Unfortunately, grub is not
> > > currently capable of booting a cdrom (as far as I con deteremine) so an
> > > enhancement to grub would be necessary to add this functionality.
> >
> >   From the rest of your message, not sure why you mention the need for
> > grub to boot from cdrom...I thought you were talking about booting from
> > floppy.  However, if someone really needs cdrom booting capability in
> > grub, take a look at the Xen virtual machine monitor project at
> > http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/ as the demo CD that
> > project puts out uses a modified version of grub with this capability.
> 
> >From previous messages, some folks are unable to boot a cdrom -- either the 
> system does not have one, or the bios is not capable of booting a cdrom, or 
> it cannot boot the isolinux cdrom.  Since the kernel has grown too large to 
> fit on a floppy, I was looking for a way to bootstrap the booting of the 
> cdrom through booting of a floppy with grub on it and then have grub boot the 
> cdrom.  If grub could pull vmlinuz and initrd.img from the dosutils/autoboot 
> directory, this could possibly get around the boot-cdrom problem.
> 
> This has to be easier than installing something like RHL 9 which is then used 
> to boot the cdrom.

Check out the thread "missing boot disk.img":

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2004-February/msg00445.html

If you have a linux system of some flavor with grub, mount the FC2T1 CD,
ir start from installation files on disk, then

  cd [install_directory]/isolinux
  cp vmlinuz /boot/vmlinuz-1.90
  cp initrd.img /boot/initrd-1.90.img

(Alternatively, do it over the net via scp, or whatever - many ways to
skin that cat - all equally odious to the cat!)

Add the following stanza to /boot/grub/grub.conf (assuming /boot is in
the first partition of the first hard drive, (/dev/hde1 for me, more
likely /dev/hda1 or possibly /dev/sda1 depending on hardware config and
BIOS settings):

title Fedora test1 (1.90) installer
        root(hd0,0)
        kernel /vmlinuz-1.90
        initrd /initrd-1.90.img

If you want to boot from a floppy, run the following script to create a
bootable VFAT formatted grub floppy with a menu, mount it, and edit the
[mount-point]/grub/grub.conf file to add the above stanza.  Then reboot
into the installation kernel, choose CD (or NFS, FTP, ...) installation
and away you go.

-------------------------- mkgrubmenu -----------------------------

#!/bin/bash
# mkgrubmenu
#
# Written by Phil Schaffner <p.r.schaffner at ieee.org>
#  based on mkbootdisk by Erik Troan <ewt at redhat.com>

pause=yes
format=yes
device=/dev/fd0
unset verbose

GRUBDIR=/boot/grub
MOUNTDIR=/tmp/mkgrubmenu
PATH=/sbin:$PATH
export PATH

VERSION=0.2

usage () {
    cat >&2 <<EOF
usage: `basename $0` [--version] [--noprompt] [--noformat]
       [--device <devicefile>] [--grubdir <dir>] [--verbose -v]
       (ex: `basename $0` --device /dev/fd1)
EOF
    exit $1
}

while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do
    case $1 in
	--device)
	    shift
	    device=$1
	    ;;
	--grubdir)
	    shift
	    GRUBDIR=$1
	    ;;
	--help)
	    usage 0
	    ;;
	--noprompt)
	    unset pause
	    ;;
	--noformat)
	    unset format
	    ;;
	-v)
	    verbose=true
	    ;;
	--verbose)
	    verbose=true
	    ;;
	--version)
	    echo "mkgrubdisk: version $VERSION"
	    exit 0
	    ;;
	*)
            usage
	    ;;
    esac

    shift
done

[ -d $GRUBDIR ] || {
    echo "$GRUBDIR is not a directory!" >&2
    exit 1
}



if [ -e "$device" ]; then {
    [ -n "$pause" ] && {
	echo -n "Insert a"
	[ -n "$format" ] || echo -n " vfat formatted"
	echo " disk in $device."
	echo "Any information on the disk will be lost."
	echo -n "Press <Enter> to continue or ^C to abort: "
	read aline
    }

    [ -n "$format" ] && {
	[ -n "$verbose" ] && echo "Formatting $device... "
	fdformat $device || exit 0
	mkfs.msdos $device > /dev/null 2>/dev/null || exit 0
	[ -n "$verbose" ] && echo "done."
    }

    rm -rf $MOUNTDIR
    mkdir $MOUNTDIR || {
	echo "Failed to create $MOUNTDIR" >&2
	exit 1
    }
    [ -d $MOUNTDIR ] || {
	echo "$MOUNTDIR is not a directory!" >&2
	exit 1
    }

    mount -wt vfat $device $MOUNTDIR || {
	rmdir $MOUNTDIR
	exit 1
    }

    mkdir $MOUNTDIR/grub

    [ -n "$verbose" ] && echo -n "Copying $GRUBDIR files... "
    cd $GRUBDIR
    cp -a stage1 stage2 grub.conf device.map $MOUNTDIR/grub
    [ -n "$verbose" ] && echo "done."

    [ -n "$verbose" ] && echo -n "Setting up GRUB... "
    grub --device-map=$MOUNTDIR/grub/device.map --batch <<EOF
root (fd0)
setup (fd0)
quit
EOF

    [ -n "$verbose" ] && echo "done."

    umount $MOUNTDIR
    rmdir $MOUNTDIR
    [ -n "$verbose" ] && echo "done setting up GRUB."
    echo "edit (fd0)/grub/grub.conf to customize."
}
else
    echo "$device does not exist"
fi