Re: Grub question

[walt]

y_farkash wrote:

> 1) Is there a way to tell where Grub is installed (MBR vs a partition) from
> the Grub command line?

Well, by definition, if you see the grub command line when you boot your
machine, grub must be installed on the mbr of your boot disk (the disk
your bios uses to boot from).  Otherwise you would never see grub appear.

Note that you can install grub in both places on the same machine, and
use the 'mbr grub' to chainload the 'partition grub' -- but I've never
seen any reason to do that.

Installing Windows after installing grub may overwrite the grub mbr, so
you should always have a bootable floppy or usb stick with the grub
installation files stored on it so you can easily re-install grub to
your hard disk.  The filesystem on the floppy/usb stick can be any fs
that grub understands, just so it can find its own installation files.

> 2) How does Grub knows where to find the '/boot/grub/menu.lst' file (which
> partition)? How does it know to look in (hd1,1)/boot/grub/ and not
> (hd0,0)/boot/grub/, and is there a way to configure where is looks for it?

My problem is that I've never used grub-install, and there may be a way
to do it that way.  Maybe by using the --root-directory flag?

By default, grub looks for /boot/grub/menu.lst on the boot drive (where
grub resides in the mbr).  Note that /boot/grub must be on a filesystem
that grub understands -- which does *not* include ntfs.  I've always
made a small FAT partition on my boot drive just for boot files from
grub and from Windows (like /ntldr or /bootmgr) and also for sharing files
between OS's because almost every OS speaks dosfs/vfat nowadays.

That's why I suggest booting from your other disk, so grub can install its
files on a dos partition or an ext2 partition -- and then when you install
grub to the mbr on that disk, it will find menu.lst in the same directory
(i.e. /boot/grub) with all the rest of its files.