[ECOS] interesting, sort of GRUB

[Chuck McManis <ecos at mcmanis dot com>]

Ok, so I used the ports version of grub and installed the GRUB 0.97 package.

Now one interesting thing about my Epia mainboard is that it can boot from 
a USB hard drive so I boot FreeBSD by plugging in a hard drive with FreeBSD 
installed. This lets me work with a "full environment" on what will 
eventually be my target hardware platform.

So on to GRUB. I read the documentation, what there was anyway ;-), on the 
ECOS site about adding GRUB to a floppy (some) and a hard drive (less).

I've got my flash drive in IDE0.

I fdisk the device so that it has a single partition. Then I newfs that 
partition and mount it on /mnt. Now I run
	grub-install --root-directory=/mnt hd0

It complains about the stage1 file like so:
via# grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/ --no-floppy hd0
The file /mnt//boot/grub/stage1 not read correctly.
via#

Now it works fine if I want to install grub on the same drive I booted the 
system from (ie the USB hard drive) but that one I'd prefer to leave with 
the standard
FreeBSD MBR.

Now in spite of its complaint, if I dd(1) in the first block of of the disk 
its nearly identical to stage1, I say nearly because the area around the 
partition table differs but that would be expected.

If I try the interactive grub shell, and use
root (hd0,0)
it says ...

    GNU GRUB  version 0.97  (640K lower / 3072K upper memory)

 [ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported.  For the first word, TAB
   lists possible command completions.  Anywhere else TAB lists the possible
   completions of a device/filename. ]

grub> root (hd0,0)
 Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0xa5

grub>

But that is because partition 0xa5 is "FreeBSD" I need to figure out how to 
tell GRUB not to worry, its UFS.

--Chuck






--
Before posting, please read the FAQ: http://ecos.sourceware.org/fom/ecos
and search the list archive: http://ecos.sourceware.org/ml/ecos-discuss