On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 9:20 AM, Al Jachimiak <[email protected]> wrote:

> Perhaps the old HDD in a usb3 or esata external enclosure could be booted
> to via grub2? Or maybe just selected from bios in pre-boot...
>
> Just a thought.
>
> -Al
>

And an interesting one too. I may need to discuss this a bit further, both
for my issue and a work-related reason.

At work, we have normal boot processes and all that, but we also maintain
an "alternate boot" system that gets used in the event of primary disk
failure. I have no real idea, but would feel safe betting that this is not
in any way unusual. On Solaris, we can come to the boot prom and issue
"boot altb oot" and it simply picks up the path to the alternate device.
You can really have as many as you want - and you can even go the "hard
way" by scanning for disks and just manually specify the physical path you
want.

the thing is, the Linux guys keep telling me that they cannot simply
"redirect" the boot process (as we do in Solaris) to use the alternate
device - we have to boot a virtual floppy, mess with the GRUB path and
allow it to find and boot the alternate disk. It isn't much, but it has
always impressed me (with the benefit of knowing absolutely nothing about
it) as just not knowing how to do it "right". My totally uninformed thought
process is - if you can do it on a virtual floppy, why can't you do it on
the primary disk? I imagine there is some real reason, but that is the
thought process I go through.

I could be - and very probably am - wrong,  but it seems kind of
short-sighted that Linux anbd/or GRUB would be incapable of specifying a
multiple set of boot paths. I would LOVE to learn enough about what I am
doing here to be able to ask - one day - "Why don't you just do THIS...."
and embarrass everyone else in the group that the N00b solved a problem.

Yeah - I DO live in a dream world - why do you ask?

JC
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