USB GRUB upgradeForum: USB booting Topic: USB GRUB upgrade started by: imhennessy Posted by imhennessy on June 26 2008,17:15
Hello all,I've recently been playing around with some other distros, and decided to do it without installing GRUB on my HDD. That works just fine; I can just pop in a USB GRUB stick, enter my settings manually, and *POOF* Fedora 9 boots. The problem is that my DSL 4.4 uses GRUB 0.91, and (it seems) the newer kernels need 0.97. So far I've managed to totally trash my DSL stick's GRUB in a botched attempt to upgrade it ( no worries, I've backups somewhere). I'm about to set off on a quest to redo my DSL stick and try to do it right. In this case, doing it right will mean installing grub to the /boot partion of my fedora install, and using that to install the newer GRUB over the old one in my DSL stick. This is instead of just trying to dd the GRUB stage_1 and stage_2 onto the DSL stick. The question is: why are we using such an old version of GRUB? is it size? or are there real compatibility issues that will doom my second attempt? many thanks ivan Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on June 26 2008,17:23
Posted by roberts on June 26 2008,17:36
DSL v4 does not need a newer grub to work. Boot loaders are your choice.I have posted a newer grub (v0.97) < bootfloppy > which is/will be required with the new version of DSL. Posted by curaga on June 26 2008,18:32
What? Are you sure? I think it's more likely your filesystem has better support in 0.97 / you have ext2/3 using large inodes which weren't supported by even 0.97 but there's a patch for 0.97.. Robert, is there some specific reason to using 0.97 for Core? Posted by imhennessy on June 26 2008,18:50
Ok,I have spent some time with my friend Google, and found a lot of people reporting that the reason they had trouble with kernels after 2.6.22 is that they had GRUB 0.91 or so, and needed 0.97. No one reports that they know why this is so, and most of the info is from forums, saying that googling led to this conclusion. There would seem to be no primary source for this information. the search continues. ivan EDIT: I have been googling "grub no setup signature found" EDIT mark 2: < http://fcp.surfsite.org/modules....orum=11 > is the single most comprehensive explanation of the problem I've seen. Posted by curaga on June 30 2008,13:21
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/7/26/310With your hint of boot signature I found this. So it's indeed so that 2.6.23 and up require atleast grub 0.93. Posted by Juanito on June 30 2008,14:17
Is grub-0.97-disk_geometry-1.patch the one you were refering to? (I'm in the middle of a usb boot grub saga and I wondered if it was this or something to do with U3) Posted by curaga on June 30 2008,15:53
No - that's another fix for 0.97, not related to the newer inode size in new e2fsprogs. A shame they don't update 0.97 as they moved on to grub 2..The LFS patch for it is grub-0.97-256byte_inode-1.patch, in LFS-dev at least. < Here >, if you want to download. On my latest system I applied this inode patch and < this colossal collective patch > from CLFS-dev to grub 0.97. Just in case you might want to recompile and get all kinds of goodies ;) it has about all fixes for grub 0.97 and the grub-splash graphic support also. Posted by humpty on July 01 2008,20:43
i've always had problems with grub and live cds because all i have is an external usb cdrom. it just seems to forget it after loading. loadlin and freedos has always worked though.
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