GRUB boot floppy - suggestion.

[Dave Baker <dsb3@earthlink.net>]

Having fought through making my GRUB boot floppy work I have a suggestion
that perhaps others can use.  I don't see this mentioned in the 'easy
guide' or any of the FAQs - perhaps if the authors of either like the idea
they can add it.

This was done by downloading the GRUB source, making both stages and using
dd to copy them both to the floppy bootsector.

When booting the first time, I really didn't know which partition to use
since I've got so many I lose track of them all.  What I did was to just
take a guess and type:
 root=(hd0,8)

grub responds with whether it could mount the partition or not, and if so
what type it was.  For me, this was 0x82 (the wrong one), so I repeat
  root=(hd0,6)

grub now says it's mounted successfully type 0x83.  Hmm - it's a linux
partition but is it the right one?

  kernel=/[TAB]
something I didn't expect at first!  GRUB does filename completion, and
shows me a directory listing of the root of the partition ... and I can
see it's the wrong one.  

  root=(hd0,7)
  kernel=/[TAB]
And yes, now it's showing the correct listing so I can continue and boot
to the right place.

After repeating the root= stage many times on one attempt it started to
report the partitions were too large for my BIOS.  I just rebooted and
this message went away and I was able to boot normally again.


I know it's not elegant but a bit of practical exploration won out over
theoretically calculating the right numbers in the first place.



-dave


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