Help With Grub

1

Hi,

I would like some help with setting-up a GRUB please.

I have several bootable partitions, some of which have non-512 byte sectors. Because of this, I can’t use the BIOS to boot some of them (at least, I believe that is why it is not working!) I’d like to put GRUB onto a floppy disk, and use its chainload feature to pass command over to the individual partitions. Could anyone give me some instructions on how to compile and install GRUB on Haiku, or, if not possible, on Windows XP/Vista. I can use an image file if necessary, as I can’t seem to access my floppy drive on Haiku, or is it not yet supported?

Thank you.

2

on Windows Vista/7, you can use EasyBCD from neosmart.net . It’s a kind of grub.

on Windows XP, you can use NTLoader’s chainload feature.

  1. Get your partition’s boot sector using linux-live-CD or a haiku-usb-stick.
dd if=/dev/partition.... of=~/haiku.img bs=512 count=1

( adapt /dev/partition… to your device name )

  1. move the haiku.img output file to c:\ (your windows boot drive)

  2. Once back in Windows, edit the c:\boot.ini file and add the following line to the end of the [operating systems] section

c:\haiku.img="Haiku"

=> Like that, you don’t need to modify the boot sector or your windows boot process ! so that’s quite safe. (I boot Haiku and UBUNTU that way - and please NEVER install grub in the master boot record MBR in any way ! It’s not correct! You MUST install grub in a boot sector)

Have fun

3

Thanks for that, but I can’t boot that far using the BIOS. I have just moved to a new HDD, and it has to run on a SATA controller card. I could never boot it, so tried some bootloaders-GAG and Smart Boot Manager, to see if they could access the card. It turns out that I could boot a useless OEM recovery partition. Further checks showed that that partition hadn’t been ‘aligned’ to the hard disk’s 4k hardware sectors. So, I can only assume that the sector size is what’s causing these problems. I assumed that GRUB could boot these partitions, so I would like to compile it from source on Haiku, install it to an image file, and put this on a floppy drive. Then, I would boot the floppy in my PC, and select the partition from there.

4

I don’t think that your 4kb disk is a problem. it should be compatible even if it is slower. However , your bios/chipset does not seem to support the SATA card (at least for booting).

Can you (still) plug a small-old disk on your motherboard ?

5

If by small old disk you mean an IDE, then yes, I can boot it. I assumed that it was a problem with the sectors because I was only able to boot the ‘misaligned’ partiiton, and have booted this disk on another mobo, using the same controller. If this continues, I’ll have quite a snotty chat with Western Digital, because I’m fed-up with all of this.

By the way, I tried to use configure from bash in the grub directory, and it said that the operation wasn’t allowed. I then tried to copy the text from the configure script into the terminal, ad it crashed…

So,

  1. Should it disallow the operation like that?
  2. Do you know how to set a file as a shell script, as I can’t figure this out, although I was using alpha 1 for this operation?
  3. Should Haiku support floppy disks?

Thanks for your help.

6

Found this online:

http://wiki.osdev.org/Disk_Images

Much easier than compilation by the looks of it. Just dd it to a floppy. Works a treat.