Joe Halpin wrote: > Well, I appreciate the input from both of you. Removing the "makeactive" > line solved my problem, but I didn't understand enough about grub to > realize the significance of doing that.
Ok so here's the deal. There is a portion of every disk called the MBR, or Master Boot Record. When your computer boots, a program stored in your BIOS reads this MBR from the disk and starts executing whatever machine code is contained in it. If this machine code was placed there by WinDOwS then the MBR machine code checks to see which partition is marked active, reads the first sector of that partition, then executes whatever machine code is contained there. Typically, if it is present, that machine code stored in the partition will start whatever operating system is installed in that partition. GRUB has a nice feature where you can install it in the MBR so it runs regardless of whatever partition is marked active. In the simplest case, installing GRUB in the MBR happens like this: # grub grub> root (hd0,0) grub> setup (hd0) grub> quit Note that this assumes that your /boot/grub directory is on your first hard drive's first partition. Also, note that for Solaris, you may need to specify the slice number, so something like this may be more appropriate for Solaris: # grub grub> root (hd0,0,a) grub> setup (hd0) grub> quit Basically, the root command tells GRUB where it can find its stage1 and stage2 boot programs (If you're curious, you can read about that in the GRUB documentation.) The setup command when not given a partition installs GRUB in the MBR of the drive, rather than inside a partition. > I can see I need to spend some time learning more about grub. I can see I need to practice explaining things better :-) Regards, Rob
