Re: grub: support 'guest disks'

[Yedidyah Bar-David]

On Thu, Sep 30, 2004 at 10:32:44AM +0200, Yotam Medini wrote:
> 
> Hello Grub gurus,
> 
> I may have missed some Grub feature or Grub hidden documentation note.
> If so, please let me know.
> 
> Say, you have two computers C1 and C2, with hard disks H1 in C1
> and H2 in C2. Now C1 has linux nicely installed on its H1, 
> while C2 & H2 are almost empty.
> 
> Say you want to install grub boot on H2 for C2.  It will be convenient
> to unscrew some screws and bring H2 as a (secondary) disk to C1, and
> use C1 to install grub in H2.  After successful installation (lots of
> chroot operations) and configuration, bring back H2 to C3.

I agree this is a useful scenario. At this situation, though, I would
connect H1 as slave in C2, boot knoppix there, copy/install whatever
I want, then take H1 back to C1.

> 
> Now, when writing the grub menu for H2, while at C1, 
> you end up referring to (hd1,.),
> while you actually want to finally have (hd0,.) when back at H2.
> A nice feature would be, to have an implicit symbol, 
> for the "device-being-booted-by", say 'bd'.

I am pretty sure what you want is possible, but might not be easy, by
playing with device.map and/or the 'map' command. I think it's more
work, and less robust, than doing it on H2 one way or another (e.g.
with a grub floppy or knoppix).
-- 
Didi