On Mon 08 Oct 2018 at 20:20:24 (+0200), Pascal Hambourg wrote:
> Le 08/10/2018 à 18:37, David Wright a écrit :
> >
> > (The origin of my system will differ slightly in being debootstrap
> > from another partition running jessie, rather than an upgrade of
> > an older system.)
> >
> > At step 3 (where I'm installing all the packages I want on the new
> > system) remove grub if it's there. (IOW I wouldn't deliberately be
> > installing it. I see no dependencies.)
> >
> > Step 4 as above.
> >
> > Step 5: Now I'm back running jessie (whence I executed the
> > debootstrap and so on).
> >
> > # grub-mkconfig > /boot/grub/grub.cfg
> >
> > which will os-prober the new grub-less system and add entries for it under
> > ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ###
> >
> > Step 6:
> >
> > # grub-set-default 'Debian 9 (on /dev/sda7)>osprober-gnulinux-simple-swan07'
> >
> > using the strings I find there.
> >
> > # reboot
> >
> > Would this work, and reboot into the grub-less system? Any snags or gotchas?
>
> Maybe, maybe not. The problem with a GRUB-less installation is the
> lack of /boot/grub/grub.cfg. Without it (or /etc/lilo.conf or
> /boot/grub/menu.lst), grub-mkconfig/os-prober cannot guess the correct
> parameters for the kernel command line. This includes not only
> parameters defined by the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX* variables in
> /etc/default/grub but also the root= parameter. Unfortunately, without
> a hint from an existing boot loader config file, it appears that
> grub-mkconfig will use the raw and possibly non-persistent root device
> name, e.g. /dev/sda7 instead of the UUID, or /dev/dm-2 instead of the
> LVM logical volume or encrypted device name.
>
> It may work if the root device is a plain partition whose name does
> not change (e.g. because there is only one disk) and the system does
> not require custom kernel parameters. Remember that logical partition
> numbers may change when creating or deleting another logical
> partition.
>
> But it won't work if the system requires custom kernel parameters or
> the root device is an LVM logical volume or encrypted device, because
> the initramfs needs root= to specify the proper form /dev/mapper/* in
> order to activate and find the device.
Fortunately I'm only in the habit of encrypting /home which is separate.
> So it may be advisable to install at least grub-common and use
> grub-mkconfig to generate /boot/grub/grub.cfg. If you also want to
> automatically update grub.cfg after a kernel package installation or
> removal, you may either install grub-pc (or any other grub flavour
> available in the arch) - without installing the boot loader - or
> create your own scripts in /etc/kernel/post{inst,rm}.d/ to do
> basically the same as zz-update-grub provided by grub-pc.
OK. I think I'll install those as grub does seem to do some reasonably
complicated stuff which I don't fancy duplicating. The main thing is
for me to check that nothing can touch the MBR, and that I have an
always functional grub setup on the older jessie system that has the
working system in menu position 0. Thanks for the hints.
The reason is that this laptop is effectively headless until either of
a) the default jessie system boots successfully or b) I reboot to the
wheezy system via grub-reboot, login and start the X server.
Either of these methods will get me VGA output to a screen; until then
I'm blind: no CMOS, no Boot menu, no Grub menu, and the only
indication that I've got a login prompt is when the disk busy light
settles at off (which means waiting sometimes for cron stuff to finish).
I'm hoping that stretch behaves like jessie and not wheezy. The system
is always on the verge of becoming a brick.
Cheers,
David.
