On Monday 02 August 2004 10:54 am, Steve Adams wrote:

When I follow the instructions in the GRUB manual for creating a GRUB boot disk:

dd if=/boot/grub/stage1 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1

dd if=/boot/grub/stage2 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 seek=1

I get a geom error upon booting to the floppy.

Any tips?

I personally like to make a grub boot floppy that contains *everything* required for grub to boot a system. Thus it should be a copy of your /boot/grub files, but not the /boot files. Using this floppy, you can easily test changes you might want to make to your boot situation as well as take it to another system for booting. The writeup below was originally written for a Caldera system but it should also work for SuSE as far as an eye perusal tells me. The unusal method of using grep to do the install is there to allow you to put comments into the /etc/grub.conf file. Still should work without the comments. (watch for the folded line in the /etc/grubfd.conf file below. The install command should be one line followed by the 'quit' command on the following line. This writeup describes how to make bootable floppy disk with a self-contained copy of GRUB on it. Such a boot floppy is very handy for: 1. Testing various configurations of GRUB and the booting of multiple Operating Systems. 2. As a recovery diskette when GRUB has been destroyed by that 'other' Operating System. The following assumes that you are using Caldera eD2.4 and that all GRUB components are kept in the /boot/grub directory. (ed: should work as is with SuSE) Note: The /etc/grub.conf file is used only to install grub and is not used by grub directly. We will create a new version of this file. 1. Format a floppy disk in FAT format: mkfs -V -t msdos /dev/fd0 <== use fd0 or fd1 as appropriate 2. Mount the floppy: mount /dev/fd0 /mnt 3. Create a boot directory and a grub directory on the floppy: mkdir /mnt/boot mkdir /mnt/boot/grub 4. Copy all files from /boot/grub to the floppy: cp -pa /boot/grub/* /mnt/boot/grub 5. Unmount the floppy disk: umount /mnt 6. Make a copy of /etc/grub.conf and call it: /etc/grubfd.conf: cp /etc/grub.conf /etc/grubfd.conf 7. Edit the new /etc/grubfd.conf file to look as follows: # # /etc/grubfd.conf - make a floppy boot disk # # To install grub on the floppy, issue the following command: # grep -v ^# /etc/grubfd.conf | grub --batch # root (fd0) install /boot/grub/stage1 d (fd0) (fd0)/boot/grub/stage2 0x8000 p (fd0)/boot/grub/menu.lst quit 8. Install GRUB on the floppy disk: grep -v ^# /etc/grubfd.conf | grub --batch GRUB version 0.5.94 (640K lower / 3072K upper memory) [ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For the first word, TAB lists possible command completions. Anywhere else TAB lists the possible completions of a device/filename. ] grub> root (fd0) Filesystem type is fat, using whole disk grub> install /boot/grub/stage1 d (fd0) (fd0)/boot/grub/stage2 0x8000 p (fd0)/boot/grub/menu.lst grub> quit And you are Done!! Note: The above will make a boot floppy with the same GRUB menu.lst as that which exists on your Hard Drive. Modify the menu.lst on the floppy as suits your needs. Information on the menu.lst file can be found in other GRUB files on the Step-by-step site. -- +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ + Bruce S. Marshall bmarsh@bmarsh.com Bellaire, MI 08/02/04 12:24 + +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ "Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest." --Mark Twain