Peter Humphrey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Sat, 07 Apr 2007 21:58:53 +0100:
>> The problem is that, having found problems with the 64-bit grub, I long >> ago got used to installing the 32-bit version, with "emerge --usepkg >> grub-static". That works fine, but because grub is in the world file it >> gets included in the wholesale reinstallation - but without the >> --usepkg parameter. > > What I should have finished by saying is that, after emerge grub-static, > fdisk shows the boot partition /dev/hda1 as of type 0x92, Amoeba > (whatever that is), and that Boot Magic can't recognise it and refuses > to boot through it. OK, to get some things straight. 1) There is no such thing as 64-bit grub. It's 32-bit (or rather, 16- bit, but compiled with 32-bit gcc, which handles 16-bit real-mode apps like grub too). To compile grub on amd64, you need either a multilib system, or a 32-bit chroot with a 32-bit toolchain. If you are running 64-bit only, you can't compile grub because it needs either a 32-bit gcc or a multilib gcc to compile. 2) The package called grub-static is a 32-bit pre-compiled binary. Nothing is compiled merging it, it just merges the pre-compiled binary. Thus, --use-package in theory has little effect on it because it's pre- compiled in any case. (The exception would be if the ebuild has changed without changing the version, or if a different version would be merged without --use-package.) It would appear that loading a current grub into the boot-sector on that partition causes it to be detected as amoebafs for whatever reason. Your existing package apparently doesn't have that reason, and you can boot thru it. For the time being, I believe your fix (taking grub out of world so it doesn't try to merge) should work. However, as Jean-Marc suggests, there's little reason to chain grub thru partition-magic's boot-manager, when grub should handle booting virtually anything (including but not limited to Linux, BSD, and the various MS-DOS and MSWormOS platforms) you need to boot directly. Thus, why not install grub into the main hard drive boot sector directly, and do away with the Partition-Magic boot-manager? Then you'd be able to clear it out of the partition's boot-sector, and not need to worry about it. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman -- [email protected] mailing list
