On Fri, 06 Nov 2009, 17:10:51 +0100, Frank Steiner wrote:

Ok, I'm getting confused completely :-) What do I need to specify to install grub on the root partition and activate it?

I now thought that this should work:

<bootloader> <global> <activate>true</activate> <generic_mbr>false</generic_mbr> <boot_mbr>false</boot_mbr> </global> <loader_location>root</loader_location> <loader_type>grub</loader_type> </bootloader>

but this ends up with a bios error message that there is no OS on the hard disk, or on a second host it boots with "L 99 99 99 99".

No wonder, as per <generic_mbr>false</generic_mbr> <boot_mbr>false</boot_mbr> you instructed AY to NOT touch your MBR. Have a look at <http://www.suse.de/~ug/autoyast_doc/CreateProfile.Bootloader.html> and you'll see that for your particular situation you just need: <generic_mbr>true</generic_mbr> <boot_mbr>true</boot_mbr>

Thus, the MBR is getting crapped somehow. How do I tell AY to install grub to my root partition and setup the MBR such that it boots from the activated partition?

See above and/or at the URL.

cu, Frank

HTH, cheers. l8er manfred -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-autoinstall+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-autoinstall+help@opensuse.org

Hi Manfred, Manfred Hollstein wrote

hmm, if you had left your initial message quoted, I wouldn't have written this reply... To understand your requirements correctly:

- There's an MBR on the disk which you want to leave intact - The MBR is able to boot the activated partition - The Linux installation should go in some arbitrary partition which should be activated by the bootloader-install

Is this what you want?

right! The MBR should just boot the activated partition. The grub code should reside on the root partition. Thus, when I install Windows on one of the hosts, it wouldn't overwrite grub (as it is not in the MBR) and I just need to activate the root partition with fdisk from within Windows to get grub back. That's how we did it with lilo so far. Now I tried <bootloader> <global> <boot_mbr>false</boot_mbr> <generic_mbr>true</generic_mbr> <activate>true</activate> </global> <loader_device>/dev/sda</loader_device> <location>root</location> <loader_type>grub</loader_type> </bootloader> hoping that <generic_mbr>true</generic_mbr> would write the "standard" code into the MBR, i.e. "boot the first activated partition". But again the disk remains unbootable. cu, Frank -- Dipl.-Inform. Frank Steiner Web: http://www.bio.ifi.lmu.de/~steiner/ Lehrstuhl f. Bioinformatik Mail: http://www.bio.ifi.lmu.de/~steiner/m/ LMU, Amalienstr. 17 Phone: +49 89 2180-4049 80333 Muenchen, Germany Fax: +49 89 2180-99-4049 * Rekursion kann man erst verstehen, wenn man Rekursion verstanden hat. * -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-autoinstall+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-autoinstall+help@opensuse.org

Hi Manfred, thanks for the proposal, but I solved it a different way. Looking into the source code of the YaST modules I learned that <location> and <loader_device> were "phasing out" options at least for grub. From what I read in the code and the y2log I tried the following configuration which works fine: <bootloader> <global> <activate>true</activate> <generic_mbr>true</generic_mbr> <boot_mbr>false</boot_mbr> <boot_root>true</boot_root> </global> <loader_type>grub</loader_type> </bootloader> I.e., the <boot_root>true</boot_root> seems to be the important option. <location> and <loader_device> only seem to confuse AY. In y2log I found that AY was trying to activate /dev/null3, thinking that the grub partition was "/dev/null". Uwe, would you mind to post such an example for "Install Grub in root partition and activate it" on the AY doc page? The documentation isn't clear so far and <boot_root> doesn't show up anywhere. cu, Frank -- Dipl.-Inform. Frank Steiner Web: http://www.bio.ifi.lmu.de/~steiner/ Lehrstuhl f. Bioinformatik Mail: http://www.bio.ifi.lmu.de/~steiner/m/ LMU, Amalienstr. 17 Phone: +49 89 2180-4049 80333 Muenchen, Germany Fax: +49 89 2180-99-4049 * Rekursion kann man erst verstehen, wenn man Rekursion verstanden hat. * -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-autoinstall+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-autoinstall+help@opensuse.org