[Gllug] Installing grub from a recovery CD

[John Winters]

On Thu, 2005-02-24 at 08:32 +0000, Tethys wrote:
> John Winters writes:
> 
> >I've installed Sarge on a box, followed by XP (in a partition reserved
> >previously).  The XP installation has overwritten Grub's component in
> >the MBR with the DOS boot loader, so I need to re-install Grub's bit,
> >having booted from a CD.
> 
> This is precisely why I never install into the MBR. I can't understand
> why the distributions all seem to do this by default. Installing into
> the first sector of the boot partition is a much saner option. The only
> downside is perhaps a few extra ms delay before the boot loader starts.
> That's a price well worth paying for the extra robustness it brings IMHO.
> Particularly as I tend to only reboot for hardware upgrades...

Perhaps they do it because you've got to have *something* in the MBR,
and if Linux is the only OS on the box you won't have the MS-DOS boot
loader there?

> 
> >This is easy using lilo - just mount the partitions and do a "lilo -r",
> >and I presume it must be possible with grub too but I can't find any
> >clues in the grub documentation.  Can anyone give me a pointer please?
> 
> 	grub-install /dev/hda

According to the man page for grub-install this does *not* do what I
want.  All I need to do is reinstall the element of grub which lives in
the MBR.

This is what puts me off grub - the documentation is *still* very poor,
and in particular it uses terms like "root directory" to mean something
different from what it usually means, *without first saying what the
re-definition is*.

John

-- 
John Winters <john at sinodun.org.uk>

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