Hey guys, I'm new to this forum, and I'm new to Linux as well. My primary device is an iMac (Apple) and I've been trying to build LFS onto an external Firewire Drive from the LFS LiveCD. I'm building version 6.8.

Everything had been going fine until the end of Chapter 8. When I hit the building the Linux Kernel part, I wasn't exactly sure what to do, and since the pre-selected options seemed viable for my setup, I just selected the default configuration (I don't think this is much of a problem, just stating in case it's important). Anyway, I start getting problems when I run into GRUB setup. But first, let me explain something.

Now, as I said, I'm not very familiar with Linux, so I assume a bootloader is sort of a shell that lets you load into your different OSes; correct me if I'm wrong. Anyway, on Macs, if I'm correct in my bootloader definition, you have one on startup, that lets you choose which partition to boot from; so, I decided not to install GRUB, and just use my Macs bootloader.

But, when I do so, I get an error upon selecting my drive: 'No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key'. Now, I'm almost certain this isn't due to the firewire drive, as I've booted other OSes from it. Also, the partition LFS is installed on, /dev/sdb1, is marked as bootable in 'cfdisk'. So up to there, no problem.

I thought that installing GRUB on my LFS would be the solution, but I was reluctant to do so, because I've heard bad stories about not being able to boot back into your host. So, I tried anyway, and on the first command (installing files to /boot/grub), I get an error, saying, approximatively, that no GRUB drive was found on /dev/sdb1. Now, I'm not certain what this means, but I know that the /boot/grub directory is being created and populated. What's going on? Am I supposed to be installing these files from the unpacked Linux Kernel directory, or does that not matter?


So, do you guys know if installing GRUB is a good idea? Has anyone ever been in a similar situation to mine where they are hesitant about how to boot into LFS from a Mac? Finally, any idea on how to get GRUB going, if that's what I need to do?

Alright, started fixing some problems, and I'm gonna post the solutions here for other people. So, here's what I did in the end: I created /boot/grub manually; then, I created the device.map in there. Still from that directory, I ran this command:

grub-install --grub-setup=/bin/true --modules=ext2 /dev/sdb1

And from there, just keep going through the GRUB part.

I don't really understand how I'm supposed to run the /sbin/reboot and GRUB legacy commands, but that's for another thread.