Karl Larsen wrote:
The things that are confusing are that grub only knows about one
partition, which is the one where it is loading its config, ramdisk
and the kernel from, so this is naturally the root while grub is
booting, and it knows it only by bios conventions, since bios is the
only way it can access anything before the kernel loads.
Actually grub uses two root messages. The root (hd0,0) is one and on
the end of the kernel line is a root=/dev/sda5 which is where the system
lives.
Yes, that's not grub's root, it's an instruction to the kernel that it
loads.
Since grub isn't Linux specific, the docs and commands don't use Linux
device name conventions even when they could (for the install steps).
Also, /etc/grub.conf is a symlink for convenience just to match
typical Linux conventions for where you expect config files to be.
The real copy of this file has to be in /boot/grub/. When you try to
move your /boot partition around or have alternates, the symlink can
end up pointing at a different place than the one actualy used during
booting.
Here is my experiance. I copied all of /boot from /dev/sda5 to
/dev/sda6 and then worked on /grub/grub.conf until I got over kernel
panic and such stuff. I deleted the /boot directory.
Grub can boot from any partition that bios can find, and you'd instruct
grub about it with the root (hdx,x) notation for the drive/partition.
It doesn't care about the linux device name, how the data got on that
partition, or whether it is ever mounted anywhere once the system starts.
I got a kernel update but I soon saw it was not working. Then I
learned I need to mount /dev/sda6 to /boot. Since the update re-made
/boot that was easy :-)
The scripts that do the installation of a new kernel make some linux and
distribution-related assumptions about where to make the changes.
Then I made /dev/sda7 for my karl which is my user name. I did that
without even reading grub because it is not covered. I just had to write
in fstab and it works just fine.
These are the things you do not find in the grub manual or other
files, so it makes it hard.
Those things aren't really related to grub, which is why they aren't in
the grub manual. They are related to how a running fedora system finds
the place from a linux perspective to make updates that grub will find
on the next boot. The reasons you have to get that part right don't
have anything to do with grub itself, just conventions within fedora.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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