[ILUG] Grub Boot issue

[Darragh Bailey]

Currently have the following really annoying problem that I would appreciate any
help with. The main problem is with installing the grub bootloader onto one of
my disks, I've give the outline of the system configuration since it could
hardly be described as standard.

Disk configuration
IDE Connections
/dev/hda = 200GB FAT
/dev/hdb = DVD Burner
/dev/hdc = CD Burner
/dev/hdd = DVD Player

RAID IDE Connections
/dev/hde = 15GB hdd, Gentoo with Software Raid
/dev/hdf = Current Fedora Core 3 and Windows drive
/dev/hdg = 15GB hdd, 2nd Gentoo with raid drive
/dev/hdh = 120GB Home, tmp windows install since 1st is messed up

The onboard raid controller has /dev/hdf setup as the boot device

on /dev/hdf
/dev/hdf1 = /boot
/dev/hdf2 = Windows (borked)
/dev/hdf4 = extended
/dev/hdf5 = swap
/dev/hdf6 = /
/dev/hdf7 = NTFS Games partition for windows

/dev/hdf3 did exists but was deleted at a later stage.


Now to the issue. Each time I use anaconda to install Fedora Core 1-3 onto
/dev/hdf using a separate boot partition it works just fine, and boots
perfectly. The device.map file has (hd0) set to /dev/hdf, and (fd0) set to
/dev/fd0, which is correct since /dev/hdf is the boot device. I do have to
change the device order using the advance options for the bootloader in
Anaconda, but thats it.


Now reinstalling Windows has messed up the bootloader and the Windows install,
and to get it running temporaily I had to reinstall Windows to the /dev/hdh
drive for the time being. However I now have get grub to reinstall itself in the
mbr correctly.

At the moment after attempting
$ grub-install --root-directory=/boot /dev/hdf

it writes the directory
/boot/boot/grub/ and puts the various files in there, which is not correct to be
gin with.

Now I had to copy the correct device.map file from /boot/grub into the new
directory structure and I re-ran the grub-install command since it was assigning
hd2 to /dev/hdf


So far it is getting to stage 1.5 and then reporting and error 5, however I have
seen this before and blowing away my linux install and reinstalling to force
anaconda to reinstall grub has worked previously and will work again. (note
kernel files must be installed before anaconda will reinstall the bootloader.)

Now I know that I can fix the problem by reinstalling, and I also know that
previously when I was not using a separate boot partition, setting up the
device.map file correctly and just running

$ grub-install /dev/hdf

worked just fine.


Now I'm pretty much sick of having to reinstall FC3 each time the bootloader
gets humped by Windows doing something stupid, and no I'm dropping Windows just
yet, in future yes, but not just at the moment.


Does anyone have any suggestions for how to get it going again? What is it about
grub that I'm missing.

I could try from grub command line as well, if thats the only way, but I'm sure
there is something simple I'm missing that ananconda does that I don't.


--
Darragh

"Nothing's foolproof to a sufficently talented fool"