RE: [gentoo-dev] Point of fact.

[Erik Grinaker <erikg@wired-networks.net>]

On Fri, 2002-03-08 at 16:55, Sean Mitchell wrote:

> Well, the rest of that whole post aside, many of us have had trouble with
> grub because we have no separate /boot partition. In my case, my /boot
> partition is on /dev/hde1, which grub just can't seem to find.
> 
> I like grub, but I've had much more success with lilo.

This is all explained in the grub documentation
(http://www.gnu.org/manual/grub-0.90/html_chapter/grub_toc.html). 

The biggest problem people have with GRUB is that they fail to realize
what root in the GRUB config means - it is not the system root, but the
root where the kernel images reside. In other words, your boot
partition.

Your config entry should be for exampe "root (hd0,0)", where hd0,0 is
your boot partition.

When you specify your kernel image you must do this relative to your
boot root, which usually should be /<your-kernel-image>. And then you
pass your *system root* as a boot argument, for example ;

kernel /bzkernel-2.4.18-2 root=/dev/hda5

Now, in order to avoid all this confusion (or perhaps add to it :)), you
can create a symlink from /boot/boot to /boot. This allows you to
specify /boot/<kernelimage> in your grub config. To do this, issue the
command "cd /boot && ln -s . boot".

now it will work to specify your kernel image as, for example ;

kernel /boot/bzkernel-2.4.18-2 root=/dev/hda5

GRUB is far superior to LILO in pretty much every conceivable way, as
long as you read the documentation and understand how it works. And when
you do so you will quickly see that LILO is a child's toy in comparison.


Feel free to add this to the docs...

-- 

Erik Grinaker
Freelance UNIX/Linux systems consultant

"Perfection is acheived not when there is nothing more to add, but
rather when there is nothing more to take away"
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry