Grub

egad · 03-05-2006, 12:53 PM

I found a flavor of grub on the slackware home page for 10.2.-installed it with pkginstall and ran grubconfig. I am a little confused- though-

My current setup is:
hda1 /boot
hda2/
hda3 swap
hda4 /home

If it makes a difference it's formated using XFS (came down to a coin toss between it and ext3).

So far so good-Lilo installed like a champ in the initial setup. When I run through grubconfig it seems to confuse it with wanting to keep a relatively small parotion for /boot--or am I being a idiot? because when prompted for where to put all the grub files I thought that /dev/hda1 when labled as /boot would let grub know just to put the files their. It seems to sort of do this when I use grub-install. Am I doing something wrong? I thought about symlinkink the folders/directories it makes to root to incasee it prefers to look for them their figuring if something does go wrong it'll least know where to start looking.
I welcome any comments (yes even, dude: back up right now and use ext3 because etc.)

Gethyn · 03-05-2006, 01:48 PM

I don't entirely understand your question. Are you saying that when you initially installed Slackware you used LILO (is this still the default on Slack?), and now you want to switch to grub? You'll want to install it to the MBR, not /boot. /boot should be a small partition. Is /boot mounted when you try to install the files there? I'm not familiar with how Slackware works, but on Gentoo /boot is not automatically mounted at startup.

I've never tried XFS, tend to use Reiser myself. You might be interested in this and this. Apparently versions of grub below 0.91 don't support XFS, but I expect Slack is using a more recent version.

egad · 03-05-2006, 02:40 PM

Oh sorry man My post when looking at it again isn't clear as I thought it was before a little coffee.
I know grub is supposed to go into the MBR
Where I'm confused is When I use grubconfig it wants to know where to place the files it asks if it's ok to put them into /dev/hda2

However I made a small gentoo style /boot partition, and was under the impression that I should point grubconfig to that....
If let it go with the default (in this cause /dev/hda2) it starts fine but then cancels with a error something about stage_1XFS failed.

You are correct that I started with LILO. I am interested in switching to grub, because I've had fairly good luck with it from before moving to Slackware from Gentoo.

After playing around with grub-install
When I do grub-install/dev/hda it seems to find /boot and /root it makes a folder in /root called /boot.

My concern is I don't want Grub to get confused between my boot partion and the folder it made also called boot.

What's your experience with Reiser like? I've only used it once and that was a long time ago. I ran into some problems with corruption.

jomen · 03-05-2006, 03:15 PM

If you have set up a separate partition to be your /boot partition, you mount it to /boot on /dev/hda2 ( your / ) - then you install grub
Grub will put its files to /boot/grub and the kernel-images should then (not necessarily - but that is what a /boot partition is for) also be stored in /boot - which is actually /dev/hda1...
With /boot mounted ( /dev/hda1 mounted to /boot on /dev/hda2 ) you run:
grub-install /dev/hda and then edit the file /boot/grub/menu.lst which is the config file

Gethyn · 03-06-2006, 12:21 PM

So far I've not had any trouble with Reiser, but I've only recently started using it. From what I hear it's pretty stable these days though.

egad · 03-06-2006, 06:29 PM

Following some of the tips from here, my system looks like this
/dev/hda1 (named boot)
/dev/hda2 (root)
/dev/hda3(swap)
/dev/hda4(home)

After unmounting /dev/hda1 running grub-install for what ever reason it didn't like my set up. Not a big deal. I ran grubconfig it liked it just fine. It's basicly grub-install with a ncurses setup. Now for some reason when I put the grub files and vmlinuz in the boot partition this causes a kernel panic. However acording to bugs-@lfs it's also a known bug with 0.97 and 0.98 Not a problem. It turns out like you guys said placing all the grub stuff in the boot partition however it likes to place it their makes grub happy-I found out that after reading up on this bug that if you make your startup line:
kernel (hd0,0) /vmlinuz and init=3 at the end of it. Grub (sofar) is happy.
My current setup is to have my boot and home partitions being ext3 with a few tune2fs enhancements (b-tree hashin and full journaling) but my root partion is Reiser. So far...it's ok.. I was so tickled that Slackware would deel quite happly with that kind of abuse I've decided to keep it.

syg00 · 03-06-2006, 06:42 PM

I always use grub - Slack included.
As an aside, what conceivable use is journalling on a /boot partition ???. What sort of update traffic are you expecting ???.

jomen · 03-06-2006, 06:54 PM

/dev/hda1 is what you want to be your /boot partition - right?
on /dev/hda2 (your / ) you have a directory called /boot - right?
mount the first (/dev/hda1) to the second (/boot on /dev/hda2) - then run grub-install /dev/hda (yes /dev/hda - not /dev/hda1 or /dev/hda2...)
If you don't mount /dev/hda1 to /boot - grub will still be installed - but its files will end up in /boot on /dev/hda2 - since your /boot partition (/dev/hda1) is not mounted to this directory...

If /dev/hda1 is mounted to /boot on /dev/hda2 the setup should be:

Code:

default 0
# this boots the first - and here the only - kernel-image listed

and:
ext3 on /boot partition makes no sense...

timeout 10
# or whatever time you want

title=_your_title_

root (hd0,0)
# which is /dev/hda1

kernel /linux-YOUR_name_for_it root=/dev/hda2
# the first refers to (hd0,0)/ --> which is /boot or /dev/hda1 (IF /dev/hda1 was mounted to /boot...)
#root= ... refers to /dev/hda2 which is your / partition

and:
ext3 on /boot partition makes no sense

egad · 03-06-2006, 07:26 PM

I read some place something similar about ext2 on boot. Out of ceriousity, would you mind explaining why that's the case.

jomen · 03-06-2006, 07:38 PM

Quote:

would you mind explaining why that's the case

If you mean my last comment: a journalling filesystem is useful for partitions in case the system gets shut down unexpectedly and uncleanly (power-fail for example) - the recovery will be faster - since the /boot partition does not even need to be mounted most of the time, this feature is not really needed - a filesystem-check will be quick even if it is not journalled, as the size of the partition is small, while a file-system check on a large partition (nowadays 100+ GB...) can take hours if it's not a journalling filesystem...

njmf · 03-07-2006, 02:06 AM

You didn't tell us whether there is a file named /boot/grub/xfs_stage1_5
This is not so likely, but who knows.

hrp2171 · 03-07-2006, 10:43 AM

What version of grub are you using? I read the XFS wikipedia entry and grub 0.91 and older don't work well with XFS.

njmf · 03-08-2006, 03:12 AM

Well, he said it is version which comes for Slack 10.2, so that should be 0.97. I wouldn't say it is problem.