[EN] [SOLVED] Install Grub In Partition Of Choice (not / or MBR)

[JustDebian]

EDIT://
i was wrong

Hi michaa7:

You were not completely wrong. Before I knew about linux partitioners, I used Partition Commander. For some reason, it considers the extended partition as sda3 (actually sda3 does not appear anywhere). Since the hard disk works and the multiple OSes work and the boot manager (Plop) works, I just don't want to monkey with it and risk losing everything.

Since I want to install GRUB in its own partition (/dev/sda4) as I had done with Squeeze and Wheezy, I am guessing that the GRUB installer is having issues. If I were to install GRUB in the / partition with the rest of Siduction, it is likely to work fine. If I can, I would like to get it to work my way, though.

Thanks for chiming in.

[michaa7]

...
You were not completely wrong...

Nice you took it that way, but I was completely wrong about your skills ;-)

[JustDebian]

To install Plop Boot Manager on a hard drive within a Grub2 distro takes a bit longer.

I will see if I need to do this after I try chroot to get GRUB installed completely. (Added April 6, 2013: I use Plop to load GRUB. If I understood the code, that set up would use GRUB to load Plop).

Plop Boot Manager is already installed on the hard drive MBR and has been working fine for two years to boot DOS, Win7, Squeeze, and Wheezy. I replaced Squeeze with Wheezy in an attempt to fix some hardware issues - it did not.

Now I replaced Wheezy with Siduction because it worked nicely and without hardware errors (so far). I just need to get a working GRUB in /dev/sda4 as with Squeeze and Wheezy so Plop has something to load. (Added April 6, 2013: after much trial and error, I figured out better how GRUB is installed by the installer).

I could install GRUB from Squeeze (as I had to do for Wheezy) but I was concerned that updating Siduction would trash something. (Update April 6, 2013: Actually GRUB from Squeeze will not work because of incompatible dependencies - I tried it). I will try to correctly do the chroot method and hope that solves the whole matter. (Added April 6, 2013: I used chroot several times but it turns out it was unnecessary because I was not using the installer correctly - I took something simple and tried to make it complicated. :oops:

I am old with brain glitches, have no formal computer/programming education, and am still fairly new to linux. So, please be patient as learn this stuff one step at a time.

I appreciate your assistance.

[Geier0815]

Ok, it's not the recommended way but did you try to install grub-legacy? This should be the old grub-version grub1. With this you shouldn't have these problems...

[JustDebian]

Ok, it's not the recommended way but did you try to install grub-legacy? This should be the old grub-version grub1. With this you shouldn't have these problems...

Out of desperation I did finally try this. The error The file stage1 not read correctly appeared. However, I was not understanding how the Siduction installer works at the time. Pursuing this approach any further is not necessary.

It was certainly a good idea, though.  

[piper]

IMHO, I would trash Plop, It's not needed.

I boot siduction, aptosid, snowlinix, solaris, windows 7, and then my test builds (fromiso) of aptosid (all flavors) and siduction (all flavors)

Sooner or later, things are going to break

But, then again, Choice is Good.

[JustDebian]

After I stopped trying to complicate what the maintainers worked so hard at simplifying, I tried a complete reinstall (several actually) from scratch.

I used Gparted from within the live-cd to:
 

1.Delete the partitions I want to use
  2.Re-create those partitions - formatting as ext4

I restarted the computer and live-cd then when through all of the preparation and update steps (AFAIK).

Then I did a clean install without monkeying with anything. GRUB still would not start.

I then reinstalled Squeeze on the same partitions (reformatted them as ext4) and in the exact same way as I have been trying to do with Siduction. Squeeze booted right up without any problem.

Without changing anything, I reinstalled Siduction in those same partitions (after the preparation and updates). The Siduction installer reformatted the / partition but apparently not the others (which is what I wanted).

The install was reported as successful. The log at the bottom showed GRUB installed in /dev/sda18 (which is the root partition). Even though /dev/sda4 was mounted as /boot, the installer only offers to install GRUB in the MBR or / partition.

When I rebooted the computer, all I got was 'GRUB' with a blinking cursor at the top left of the screen. Apparently there is some problem with using a separate /boot partition for GRUB.

Since all releases of Debian have worked fine with my partition arrangement since Sarge, I am certain there is way to fix this issue. Unfortunately, I do not have the knowledge to do that.

To the best of my knowledge, Siduction is installed fine - it just needs GRUB to work.

[michaa7]

I *assume* there was a difference between you siducion and your Squeeze install: The Debian installer let you define a /boot partition, the siduction install did not, right?

When you installed siduction dev/sda4 was mounted to /boot. So your install apparently went well. But when Grub starts, sda4 isn't mounted to /boot. So your PlobBM starts Grub on sda18, and Grub looks for whatever on /boot and will find nothing (as all files Grub is looking for aren't on the partition containing "/").

I think you have to edit the grub config file (because it does not point to sda4. But I still am not familiar enough with Grub2 to tell you which file to edit.

[JustDebian]

Installing Siduction-RazorQt from the 09 December 2012 live-cd with GRUB installed in a partition different from the / partition would not boot after restart.

Booting from the live-cd and following the chroot instructions multiple times to reinstall GRUB did not work.

Reformatting the partitions and doing multiple clean installs did not help.

After the last clean install, the use of SuperGrub2 v2.00 (http://www.supergrubdisk.org/super-grub2-disk/) found two grub.cfg files on the system - one in the /boot partition and one in the /boot directory under /. Selecting the grub.cfg in the /boot partition brought up the normal GRUB bootloader menu. From it, Siduction could finally be started.

From within installed Siduction, the instructions for doing a dist-upgrade were followed:
http://manual.siduction.org/en/sys-admin-apt-en.htm#apt-cache

After the dist-upgrade was complete, GRUB was reinstalled:

Code: [Select]

apt-get install --reinstall grub-pc
During configuration, a window popped up offering choices as to where to install GRUB. In this instance, the designated /boot partition was offered (it was not during previous installs).

After a restart, GRUB was seen by my Plop Boot Manager and started GRUB normally which, in turn, booted Siduction.

Possibly, had I done a dist-upgrade from the live-cd, all of the necessary packages and processes would have been available to do a clean and proper install the first time. With the ways and means of Siduction being different from what I had known, that option seemed counter intuitive. I thought that I saw a section in the manual about doing a live-cd dist-update but I could be wrong.