On Mon, 20 Sep 1999, Glenn McGrath wrote:
> Does anyone know how GRUB would go as an alternative to lilo for booting
> root raid partitions?
>
> Ive heard its fairly flexible, but seems pretty complex to me, i tried
> getting it working, but never really understood it. Stage 1, 1.5 2 etc...
> But if this complexity makes it flexible it may be worth having another look
> at it.
I've done it, and once you understand how it works (which is difficult given
the somewhat cryptic documentation) it is pretty straightforward. I'm
sending this msg from a system booting from a RAID 1 using GRUB.
If you're using RAID 1 (mirroring) Grub is willing to believe that each of
the mirrors is really just a normal ext2 filesystem and will read the kernel
from it.
I said I would write up a mini-howto, and then got buried in some other work
(and a vacation) and haven't done it yet.
Also, as soon as I figured out GRUB, the author changed his website to point
to GNU GRUB (http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/), and I decided I'd be better
off writing that up since he seems to have bailed on further development.
Of course, the GNU developers only have an alpha release available, and in
detestable GNU style, you can only build it with the latest and (ahem)
greatest gcc, binutils, etc.
The upside is that they seem to have a /sbin/grub that can install GRUB on a
running system without the need to boot from a grub floppy. That should
simplify the installation.
-Andy
