grub vs. grub2

[Greg Woods]

On Sat, 2012-02-11 at 12:38 -0800, Joe Zeff wrote:
> On 02/11/2012 12:18 PM, JD wrote:
> >
> >
> > Is it even possible to boot F16 using Grub 1?
> 
> AIUI, if you upgrade to F16 you will end up with both versions of grub 
> installed but will still be using legacy grub.  You have to run 
> grub2-install yourself.  I've no idea why, or why the upgrade process 
> doesn't tell you about it.  My only guess is that somebody wasn't quite 
> confident enough that the conversion would be 100% transparent and 
> decided that this would be safer.

As has been mentioned in other threads, grub2 requires 2048 sectors at
the start of the disk. If you were upgrading from a previous version,
chances are your disk is not partitioned this way, but instead has only
63 sectors at the start of the disk. In this event, if you attempt to
install grub2, or even just update its configuration, you get an
"embedded area is too small" error. So I would guess you won't really be
using grub2 until your disk has a large enough area for it.

I haven't actually tried upgrading a system that was already partitioned
with 2048 free sectors to see if grub2 would be automatically installed
in that case.

--Greg