Re: Is it possible to have grub2's boot.img as my MBR, but have it look in a separate partition for core.img?

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@ubuntu.com>]

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 03:37:44AM +0000, Wesley Smith wrote:
> I am sorry to bother you, but reading the docs has not helped, and Googling has
> turned up only other people suffering from the same problem, but not the
> solution to it.
> 
> I have a multiboot system that I would like to use Grub to manage. The version
> of Grub shipping with my Linux distro is Grub2, and it installs its equivalent
> of core.img into the remaining sectors on the first track after the MBR but
> before the first partition. Unfortunately, those sectors are needed by another
> program.
> 
> I have a separate primary /boot partition, with the rest of my Linux distro
> stored in an LVM. If I could only keep boot.img as my MBR but have it look in
> the /boot partition for core.img rather than having it read an embedded one from
> the sectors immediately following the MBR, everything would work fine. Is this
> possible with Grub2?

Yes, you can do this by using 'grub-install /dev/sda1' (or whatever the
device name for your /boot partition is).

Note that this setup typically requires the use of blocklists, which are
inherently unreliable.  For example, you may find that you need to
re-run grub-install after certain filesystem operations; see the "And
blocklists?" section of http://grub.enbug.org/BIOS_Boot_Partition for a
description of the problem.  This problem was present in GRUB Legacy as
well, although it did not warn about it.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@ubuntu.com]