Bug 47399

Summary:	error booting grub floppy
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Gene Czarcinski <gczarcinski>
Component:	grub	Assignee:	Jeremy Katz <katzj>
Status:	CLOSED RAWHIDE	QA Contact:	Jay Turner <jturner>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	7.3	CC:	srevivo
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2001-07-14 17:00:48 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Gene Czarcinski 2001-07-05 11:04:25 UTC

Description of Problem:
The grub info documentation says that you can create a grub floppy by
dd'ing stage1 and stage2 to a floppy disk.  However, booting this floppy
gives an error during stage2.

How Reproducible:
always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. fdformat /dev/fd0H1440
2. dd if=/boot/grub/i386-redhat/stage1 of=/dev/fd0 bs=515 count=1
3. dd if=/boot/grub/i386-redhat/stage2 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 skip=1
4. boot the floppy

Actual Results:
error in stage2

Expected Results:
grub running

Additional Information:

Comment 1 Steve Bonneville 2001-07-06 14:53:05 UTC

The info documentation actually says:

dd if=stage2 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 seek=1
                                ^^^^
This worked for me.

Comment 2 Gene Czarcinski 2001-07-07 06:40:29 UTC

pilot error

Comment 3 Gene Czarcinski 2001-07-14 17:00:44 UTC

I am reopening this because there is a "bug" of sorts.

Sometime after closing this report previously, I tried to build another grub
boot floppy using the dd of stage1 and stage2 and again I came up with something
that got an error only this time I very importantly used the seek=1 for stage2.

After some experimenting and comparing stuff with hexdump, I have found the
problem:  to create a stage1/stage2 grub boot floppy, you MUST use a stage2
which is NOT being used by grub on a harddisk.  That is, you must use a stage2
from a system where grub is not installed and lilo or a boot-floppy-only is used.

Proposed solution:

1. update the (info) documentation to reflect this situation.

2. Change the grub rpm to install a second copy of stage2 as something like
"stage2.4.floppy".

3. Optionally, create a man page such as grub.floppy to explain this.

Comment 4 Jeremy Katz 2001-07-19 20:23:29 UTC

Pristine grub stages are now properly in /usr/share/grub/i386-redhat...   also,
you might want to try /sbin/grub-install /dev/fd0 since it's easier =)

Applies to grub-0.90-6 and up