Alvin Oga wrote:
On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, Mike McCarty wrote:
it'd be pointless to install the grub mbr on /dev/hde if it cannot boot
Umm, no, what he's doing is perfectly reasonable.
if doesn't work ... one should figure out technically why it will
not work
- some bios will NTO let you boot from /dev/hde is all
i'm saying and since it is a "grub woes" what does grub do
for you in this case, esp if as you say, he's not booting it ??
He wants to
duplicate boot discs for use on other machines.
ah... more grub problems ..
Yeah. Well, not problems. Just want to install using a technique
GRUB isn't deliberately set up for.
you cannot move a /dev/hde w/ grub info already on it from PC#1
to boot it as /dev/hda on PC#2 and expect pc#2 to boot it
- explain why ... you can .. and under what circumstances
you can boot
Of course he can't just do that. Nobody has said he could.
The trick is to figure out a way to accomplish the end goal,
which is to be able to put a disc into a machine, type a command
or three, and in several minutes have a disc which can be used
that way. THAT is what I think is the goal, and I also think it is
reasonable to want to do. And I'm sure there is a way to
do it. Just haven't figured it out, yet :-)
- same disk config or different disk config in terms of
the number and ordering of fd, cd, dvd, ide, scsi
and also referring to /boot/grub/device.map
- since you're moving from /dev/hde which presumably
implies you booted a different disk that you're trying to
clone... you will have problems as /dev/hde become /dev/hda
but is trivially fixed in 5 seconds if you know what to
change .. and with grub you do NOT need to edit files
and can change it dynamically to test it
Yep.
IIUI, he doesn't want to boot from /dev/hde ever.
which gets back to the point .. why bother with grub in that case
He wants GRUB on the /dev/hda when he moves the disc to the
new machine. He wants GRUB to manage the boot from the disc
he's making. At some point, GRUB needs to be installed
somewhere.
He wants to create a disc
connected as /dev/hde which can become /dev/hda on another
machine.
and again .. why ???
Because he has lots of machines to install on. I forget the
number, if he even mentioned it exactly, but the impression I get
is tens of machines with identical or nearly identical discs.
He wants a disc duplicator which will duplicate a bootable hard
disc.
- it's a lot of headache when there are trivially 100x simpler
ways of doing the same thing
One way to do that would be to dd if=zero of=/dev/hda ...
that could be the equivalent of " rm -rf " if one were to use
that command without knowing what it might do
Umm, no. This was in context of copying the device. If the device is not
filled with zeroes, then the compression doesn't work so well,
and that would result in very large file.
and then make the thing a minimal bootable, then put it on
as, say, /dev/hdf and then dd if=/dev/hdf | gzip image to create a
(relatively) small image on /dev/hda.
now you have /dev/hdf to create what would be /dev/hda on /dev/hde
( more complications )
I've tried to figure out a way he can clone his boot for him without
writing multi-megs of data. It should be easy, but isn't, quite.
to clone any boot info from any disk to another ..
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc bs=446 count=1
where you want /dev/hda to be the way the clone will boot
when /dev/hdc will become /dev/hda later in a different
or same box
And that causes /dev/hdc to have Linux installed on it how?
converting hda to hdc is a imple matter of changing fstab
Well, this isn't what I think he wants to do.
He has, say, twenty virtually identical machines with Some Other
OS installed on them. Call these machines B-U.
He wants to take the hard drive out of each, say one or two at
a time, and put them into a machine which already runs Our Favorite OS.
Call this machine A. So he takes the disc out of machine B, and puts
it into machine A, and boots.
He then would like to issue a few commands, which hopefully run in a
reasonable amount of time, after which he can take the disc originally
from disc B back out of machine A, and put it into machine B, which
then automagically is a Linux booting machine. Then he'd like to repeat
this with the disc currently in machine C, making machine C a Linux
machine. And so on.
This is what I understand to be the goal. It's a reasonable one.
And I'm pretty sure it's achievable. One just has to hold his
tongue right.
There may be a better way to clone off machines. Maybe you even
know one.
- there are say hundred ways to make a bootable disk
and NOT all will work in all situations
Well, that's pretty much evident.
Mike
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