[Gllug] How to tell grub where to find menu.lst

[John Winters]

On Sat, 2005-06-11 at 11:38 +0100, Mike Brodbelt wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-06-11 at 10:25 +0100, John Winters wrote:
> 
> > I've got to the point where grub is installed in the MBR, but it always
> > boots to the grub command prompt and I have to type in the "root",
> > "kernel" and "initrd" bits manually.  /boot/grub/menu.lst exists, but
> > grub doesn't seem to know about it.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> >     grub-install --no-floppy --root-directory=/boot /dev/hda
> > 
> 
> Grub will look for "boot/grub/menu.lst" relative to whatever you set the
> grub root directory to. This defaults to /, but your command line above
> will have grub looking for "/boot/boot/grub/menu.lst".

Thank you - that was the clue I needed.  It seems that the documentation
provided in the Debian Sarge grub package is wrong.  It says you need
that parameter if your /boot is a separate partition, but in fact it
just FUBARs things.

>  The whole
> situation is not really helped by the fact that grub uses its own
> terminology for everything, often redefining terms you'd expect to mean
> something different. 

Not only different meanings from the conventional ones, but the meanings
don't even stay consistent within grub.  "root" is used with (at least)
two different meanings within the grub documentation, which I suspect is
what led to the error in the Debian documentation above.


> The grub-install command is just a shell script wrapper
> around /sbin/grub, which copies necessary bits to the "boot" directory
> underneath whatever you specified as the root directory. It's supposed
> to pass the --no-floppy option through to the grub shell...

Yes, but apparently the device mappings file overrides the command line
parameters - this should surely work the other way around - and there
was an extra device mappings file nestling in /boot/boot/...

Thanks for your help.

John

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