argh, grub woes

[Collins Richey]

On Thu, 25 Nov 2004 14:39:36 -0500, Bruce Marshall <bmarsh at bmarsh.com> wrote:
> On Thursday 25 November 2004 02:18 pm, Collins Richey wrote:
> > I disagree. grub.conf and/or menu.lst in the older grub must be
> > available at boot time to build the menu list of bootable systems.
> > That's why you don't have to run grub after modifying the conf as is
> > the case with lilo. At install time, grub stores its own pointer to
> > the "root" you have specified so that it can find the conf when you
> > boot.
> 
> Here's my /etc/grub.conf  (SuSE 9.2)
> 
> root (hd0,6)
> install --stage2=/boot/grub/stage2 /grub/stage1 (hd0) /grub/stage2 0x8000
> (hd0,6)/grub/menu.lst
> quit
> 
> which installs grub on SuSE.   Now I guess it is possible that RH has
> perverted the install process so that instead of menu.lst being specified on
> the install line, it points to grub.conf.   Have never ever seen that type of
> setup.
> 

I've never used install (only setup), and thus I know nothing about
this /etc/grub.conf. Setup requires no conf file of the sort you are
recommending, but does check for the presence of the stage files and
grub.conf/menu.lst in the directory /boot/grub (or /grub if using a
/boot partition) pointed to by the root statement before writing the
mbr as pointed to by the setup statement.

In the old days there was only menu.lst (still needed if you make a
grub boot disk on a dos formatted floppy since *.conf isn't legal on a
dos file system). Every distro I've worked with in recent years has
/boot/grub/grub.conf with a symlink as menu.lst. As Lonni said, they
are one and the same, and grub accesses the file at boot time via the
pointer it has memorized during setup. The gentoo setup goes one step
further and puts a boot symlink in the boot directory so that you can
continue to use the /boot/grub/... syntax even with a separate boot
partition.

HTH,

-- 
 Collins