Grub

[jdow]

From: "Karl Larsen" <k5di at zianet.com>

>    All computers have a bios that does many things. The one thing I'm 
> interested in today is it's assignment of hard drives that are ide 
> devices. On my bios it reads the hard drive and finds out if it is set as 
> a Master or a Slave. It puts them in it's list in that way. There is a 
> cable select thing which requires a special cable which I do not have.
>
>    Once it has the hard drives assigned the bios is done. Now in Linux 
> there is the new Grub which is pretty simple. It stores all it's stuff at 
> /boot/grub/ and it puts the file grub.conf in /etc/. It needs to put some 
> information in the Master Boot Record part of a hard drive so it can read 
> that information and boot the proper system.
>
>    Getting grub working has been a simple task. I learned from this list 
> that all you need to do is start grub in a root terminal and once it comes 
> up do this:
>
>    1. Tell grub which root you want to boot with: #grub> root (hd1,5) and 
> hit enter. It will say what kind of partition it found.
>
>    2. Now let grub put this information into the MBR with:
> # grub> setup (hd0) which will put the data onto the first hard drive's 
> MBR.
>
>    This works fine on FC6 and earlier but it fails on F7. There are those 
> who think it is the bios which is changing. They are wrong.

Karl, there is a reason RedHat and Fedora use labels for mounting file
systems rather than the old /dev/hda.

One GOOD reason now is that the drives are now declared differently.
What used to be /dev/hda is now /dev/sda. There are no problems at
all if you are using labels for booting. You can also change drives
around at will, as long as the proper drive is used for booting.

I have taken the labeling one step further than I remember RedHat
taking before. I labeled the FC7 install with a "-7" at the end of
the label to make it distinguishable from the others. So I have
things like sda0 is labeled "/boot-7" and so forth.

{^_^}   Joanne, also a ham.