network boot/ install and grub?

[hbrhodes]

Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:

>hbrhodes wrote:
>  
>
>>hey i think i have a thread on this before ... if not recently.  but i
>>had to ask my question too.  i'm having extreme difficulty making a boot
>>disk.  i've tried doing it from my linux computer and using rawrite from
>>the wife's which has WinXP.  none of the computers will boot from the
>>usb pen drive.  i have the system bios set up to do so, but it won't
>>work.  SO.... i ask the topic question:
>>
>>is there a way to have grub boot to my computer upstairs?  i want the
>>computer to boot into the folder with the FC5 files ... or a folder with
>>the iso image of FC5.  i have NFS turned on upstairs. the host / server
>>(really a client which serves as a dumping ground) is downstairs.
>>
>>they are both amd 1600+ athlons.  both are using FC5.
>>
>>192.168.100.102 (upstairs)  this is the one i have the image iso on.
>>192.168.100.101 (downstairs) this is the one i want to install too.
>>
>>NFS is on, firewall is off (router serves that function), and exports
>>and hosts are set up.  everything should work!  but i don't know how to
>>edit grub.conf ...
>>
>>thanks
>>
>>hbrhodes
>>
>>    
>>
>You could take a look at
>http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#Diskless and use
>the pxeboot image. I have not done it, but it should work.
>
>Now, as far as the USB image goes, one thing you can try is to
>reformat and re-partition the pen drive so it has one FAT16
>partition. Then try writing the USB boot image to the FAT16
>partition instead of the entire drive. I did that here, and it
>booted fine. If your pen drive is sda, then you would do something
>like "dd if=/dev/bootdisk.img of=/dev/sda1". See if your system
>likes that better.
>
>Mikkel
>  
>
do you know if i can chroot to /dev/sda1 and unmount the original
system?  i need to resize2fs the original system to expand the LVM and
it won't let me while / is mounted at boot time.  Really what i could
use is a way to have grub boot to the sda1 partition ...

The really important thing i need to do is get around mounting the main
hard drive, so i can resize2fs the main drive.  the computer does not
have a cd-rom, just four hard drives (eide kind).  so i'm going to try
the grub.conf file and try editing it.... but i don't have any
experience with it really.  OR, if i can use GRUB to boot into a folder
on the other computer so i can reinstall.  though i would rather resize
... hehe ...

thanks for your help,
have a nice day!