FC2 Install does not Create Boot DISK?

[Jeff Vian]

On Fri, 2004-09-10 at 08:57, Paul Howarth wrote:
> Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> > On Fri, 10 Sep 2004, Paul Howarth wrote:
> >>Even simpler, you could use bootpart (http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm) to
> >>add an entry to the XP/NT4/Win2K boot menu (c:\boot.ini) to chain-load grub
> >>from the first sector of the /boot partition and then you don't have to fiddle
> >>with fdisk at all. The Red Hat / Fedora installers all offer the option of
> >>installing the boot loader on the first sector of the root (not boot)
> >>partition, so this is vey easy to set up. Using this method, you don't even
> >>need grub to be installed on a primary partition.
> > 
> > 
> > Interesting.  I knew that was possible, but I had a working solution so
> > never researched how to do it.  But it does solve some issues that come up
> > with the limitation on primary partitions on some laptops.  (If you know
> > the format, you can edit c:\boot.ini by hand, but be careful!)
> 
> You still need bootpart (or equivalent) because it writes a short "boot 
> sector" file that is called up from the boot.ini entry. The program in that 
> file is customised to chain load the bootloader from the first sector of the 
> selected partition. Once installed though, you never need to change it unless 
> your partition table changes.
> 

You can also manually put a file containing the first 512 bytes of the
boot sector in c:\, then point the c:\boot.ini to that for booting linux
from XP/2K/2K3

I do this regualrly.

# dd if=/dev/<boot_part> of=boot.img bs=512 count=1
will give you the boot sector image.  Then just put the created boot.img
file on c:\ and you have it done after editing boot.ini.

 
> > The grub option actually does offer to install on whatever partition
> > contains /boot.  If you have a separate /boot (an old habit from when
> > /boot needed to be in the first 1024 cylinders), then that's /boot.  If
> > not, it's /.
> 
> Hmm, never noticed that but it would certainly make sense.
> 
> Cheers, Paul.
> 
>