Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3506 mails)

[Paul Abrahams <abrahams@xxxxxxx>]

On Sunday 17 September 2006 10:50 am, Carl Hartung wrote:
> On Sunday 17 September 2006 10:18, Paul Abrahams wrote:
> > Now that several of us seem to agree that the situtation is at least a
> > little murky, I'll ask one question again: if I'm getting a Stage 1.5 or
> > Stage 2 error, doesn't that imply that grub has not even gotten as far as
> > looking at the individual choices within menu.lst?  If there's a problem
> > with the choices, I'd expect it to appear *after* I made a defective
> > choice.
>
> This deduction appears correct to me at first glance. In fact, if GRUB
> isn't installed correctly, it won't know where /boot resides (... on a
> separate partition? ... under '/' on which partition?)
>
> All the files that GRUB needs to function properly reside under /boot.
> When it is installed, it must to point to /boot so it can read and display
> the boot menu.

So the likely problem then is that the pointer to /boot from the MBR is not 
what it should be -- right?  
>
> > If that's the case, then the problem seems to lie not so much on the
> > contents of menu.lst as in how the contents of menu.lst get transferred
> > into the MBR
>
> GRUB does *not* write anything from /boot/menu.lst into the MBR.

Agreed -- it doesn't copy that stuff, it supposedly creates a pointer to it.
>
> > I've also tried entrusting the entire process to Yast, with default
> > choices, but Yast seems not up to the job here in the case where /boot is
> > in a separate partition.
>
> This is a known 'hiccup' that we've already discussed. Please pay
> particular attention to one known fact about this 'hiccup':  It is usually
> not *fatal*. It is usually very easily corrected by:
>
> a. booting to rescue
>
> b. mounting the partition holding the file /boot/grub/menu.lst
>
> c. editing menu.lst to clean up YaST's partition mapping errors.
>
> d. reboot and be happy

I did just that, several times -- and I was not happy.  I got the read errors.

If my conclusion about the erroneous pointer is correct, fixing menu.lst will 
not fix the problem.  Also, you forgot to mention our good old friend 
grub-install in your list above.

Paul