From: Kunihiro Ishiguro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: My experience with grub
Date: Thu, 13 May 1999 04:40:35 +0900
> Now I understand stage2 (after grub-0.5 it grow) does't fit to Hard
> Disk first cylinder area. So in my case (stage1.5 or stage2 have to
> exist in first 1024 cylinder area) I have to use stage1.5 for booting
> form Hard Disk Drive. But grub-0.5.9X is rotten and it can't work for
> me.
You misunderstand the requirement. Stage 2 does not need to be fit
in the first cylinder, but it must be represented as less than 8
block-lists. When installing GRUB, GRUB attempts to collect contiguous
blocks into one entry, so if your HDD is not fragmented, there is no
problem. The reason why I recommended to use Stage 1.5 is that Stage
1.5 is just much smaller than Stage 2, but not that Stage 1.5 is fit
in the first cylinder.
However, your experience could have me to reconsider the
installation algorithm and Stage 1 loading mechanism, because it was
the first report that Stage 1 -> Stage 2 didn't work but Stage 1 ->
Stage 1.5 -> Stage 2 worked fine. I think the current implementation
of Stage 1 is not good since whether the installation succeeds depends
on a chance.
In my opinion (my opinion is NOT the maintainer's opinion), Stage
1.5 should disappear, because it is hard to keep Stage 1.5 small
enough, and there is no reason that we must use Stage 1.5 except that
Stage 2 is too large for the user. So I thought of this algorithm:
1. Stage 1 records a fixed size of block-lists within its data
(perhaps 8 entries are enough).
2. Stage2's first some blocks contains self-loading code and
block-lists for itself.
This algorithm is useful because it does NOT only depend on the status
of HDD, but also it makes Stage 1 simpler. Any volunteers?
> 2. Installation command description about stage1.5.
>
> There is no documentation about how to install stage1.5.
> In my case, I've checked source files. *sigh*
I'm sorry, that should be documented.
> Off cource I'll investigate config_file detection problem. But I'm
> very sleeply and tired. But I'm very happy with I can boot from Hard Disk
> Drive. I hope my experience will be help to other grub user.
That's strange. Pavel said that he could successfully load the
configuration file a while ago. But I'll investigate that. Thanks for
your efforts.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
OKUJI Yoshinori <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ^o-o^
http://duff.kuicr.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~okuji (in English) m /
