On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 2:50 PM, Ronald F. Guilmette <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I have the following situation: > > I have a fresh brand new drive that I have partitioned (MBR style) using > the Gparted Live CD. I have also used the Gparted Live CD to copy a > number of pre-existing partitions from other drives onto the new drive. > In particular, I have copied onto the new drive: > > 1) A Windows 7 recovery partition > 2) A Windows 7 boot/system partition > 3) A FreeBSD boot/system partition > 4) A FreeBSD data partition > > All space on the new drive is now occupied by the above partitions, except > for the first 1 MiB of the drive. > > I have heard that Grub2 is a Good Thing[tm] and would like to install it > and use it as a (multi-)boot manager on the above drive. What is the > simplest, fastest, and easiest way to accomplish this? > > I am a total n00b with respect to Grub/Grub2, so detailed instructions > would be greatly appreciated. > > Must I first find a whole 'nother drive, install some flavor of Linux on > that other drive, boot that other drive, and then use Linux to install > Grub2?
Definitely not needed. > > > Regards, > rfg > > > P.S. I did make some modest effort to research this question before posting, > and I even downloaded and burned the latest Ubuntu (desktop) onto a DVD, > booted that into "live" mode, and then tried: > > sudo grub-install /dev/sda > > but I only got an error saying something about "/cow". Every grub-install command has an implied argument "--boot-directory=/boot/" unless you specify --boot-directory explicitly. What that means is that "grub-install /dev/sda" is equivalent to "grub-install --boot-directory=/boot/ /dev/sda". So you're telling grub-install to copy all its files to "/boot/", then create a boot sector and core.img that will be able to read those files. Except on a LiveDVD system "/boot/" is a read only filesystem (DVDs and squashfs filesystems are read only), with a Copy On Write ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy-on-write ) overlay on top of RAM to make it seem like you can actually write to it. The COW in /cow/ stands for Copy On Write, but all you really need to understand from all of this is that since you don't want to use the DVD's /boot/, because that simply doesn't make sense. You do however need a /boot/, so you'll need to decide which partition should contain grub's /boot/grub/, mount that partition somewhere, and pass the path to the /boot/ directory on this partition to grub-install's --boot-directory option and create an appropriate grub.cfg in. http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/html_node/Multi_002dboot-manual-config.html -- Jordan Uggla (Jordan_U on irc.freenode.net) _______________________________________________ Help-grub mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-grub
