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

["Grégoire Sutre" <gregoire.sutre@gmail.com>]

Wesley Smith wrote:

> Thanks for your help, but no, it appears you cannot do this by simply using
> "grub-install /dev/sdx". I tried this, and yes, it did make the target
> partition bootable (it contained a Grub loader in its PBR). However, to ensure
> the disk MBR had also been updated and was now getting its core.img file from
> the /boot partition and not from the sectors immediately following it, I built
> a dummy track containing just the MBR post-"grub-install" and nothing but zeros
> after, and then I copied it to /dev/sda:
> 
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/track.image bs=512 count=63
> dd if=/dev/sda of=/track.image bs=512 count=1 conv=notrunc
> dd if=/track.image of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=63

I believe that you should replace the GRUB MBR code with an ``MS-DOS 
like'' MBR that looks for the first active partition and boots it.  Here 
you keep the old GRUB MBR code that will try to load core.img from the 
first track.

I guess that you can get such an MBR boot code from many places (I 
personally use the NetBSD boot selector) and then you simply:

dd if=<the mbr boot code> of=/dev/sda bs=446 count=1

Well, I'm no expert, but that always worked for me.

Grégoire