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> false false </global> root grub </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 false false 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: true true

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> false true <activate>true</activate> </global> /dev/sda <location>root</location> grub </bootloader> hoping that true 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 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> true false true </global> grub </bootloader> I.e., the true seems to be the important option. <location> and 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 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