Grub Manual

[Mike Wright]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> John Summerfield wrote:
> 
>> Les Mikesell wrote:
>>
>>> John Summerfield wrote:
>>>
>>>> You should do your homework now, and make a proper effort at 
>>>> understanding the existing GRUB documentation. It may be difficult 
>>>> to understand (though I don't find it so),
>>>
>>>
>>> Is there a sure-fire way to know the right 'root (hdx,0)' invocation 
>>> when you are installing grub on the 2nd disk of a raid1 pair when you 
>>> expect the drive id to shift in case the primary drive dies (scsi) or 
>>> when you don't (ide)?  Of course in the IDE case many failure modes 
>>> will make the machine not boot until you remove the dead one, in 
>>> which case you might as well shift it to the primary position anyway, 
>>> and you'd still like it to boot.
>>>
>> I think grub pretty much follows the BIOS.
> 
> 
> All this talk about grub reminds me of something I wanted to do a few 
> years ago and never quite succeeded, so maybe someone else will know how.
> 
> I'd like to have a locally installed system, but have one of the boot 
> choices be to network-boot into an LTSP thin-client. I don't want to 
> just PXE boot because I want the default after a timeout to be a local 
> OS.  I thought some versions of grub used to be able to do the 
> equivalent of an etherboot internally, but that may be gone now.  If I 
> have a stand-alone bootable floppy or CD that will network-boot the way 
> I want, is there a way to copy that to the hard drive and make a grub 
> menu choice that will load it?
> 

Hi Les,

If I understand you correctly that sounds like my setup.  I use pxeboot 
with a tree'd menu.  Sub menus are boot, install, and tools.  If nothing 
on the main menu is selected within the timeout period the connecting 
machine is instructed to boot locally using its own grub loader.

Here is the top level menu (/tftpboot/pxeboot.cfg/default)

DEFAULT menu.c32
TIMEOUT 100
ONTIMEOUT local

MENU TITLE Main Menu

LABEL local
     MENU LABEL Boot from ^Local Drive
     LOCALBOOT 0

LABEL boot
     MENU LABEL ^Boot
     KERNEL menu.c32
     APPEND pxelinux.cfg/boot

LABEL install
     MENU LABEL ^Install
     KERNEL menu.c32
     APPEND pxelinux.cfg/install

LABEL tools
     MENU LABEL ^Tools
     KERNEL menu.c32
     APPEND pxelinux.cfg/tools

If you want the submenus, too, let me know.

Mike Wright :m)