impossible to install off-system ?

[Oskar Schirmer]

Hello,

we are developing an embedded system, trying to use grub.
the system has no floppy, no hd, but a compact flash as
main storage. this compact flash is available as IDE0 slave
device (/dev/hdb for linux). Now, to get the system onto
the flash, we stick it into a "dazzle*" flash reader/writer,
which comes up as first scsi device (/dev/sda for linux),
do the fdisk/mke2fs/tar sequence and then try to install
grub 0.93 onto it, while chroot'd into the target subtree:

address@hidden:/ # grub-install /dev/sda

which fails, it sais:

/dev/sda does not have any corresponding BIOS drive.

the point seems to be, that the dazzle device shows up at
/dev/sda, first device in the scsi subsystem. somehow grub
refuses to just plug its stuff on there. why? we tried
several variants of the theme, no way. we also tried it from
outside (without chroot), with the --root-directory option,
but then grub doesn't even find its own binaries:

gurke:/mnt/mnt # usr/sbin/grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/mnt /dev/sda
/usr/sbin/grub: Not found.

how to solve this riddle?
thanks,
  oskar
-- 
oskar schirmer, emlix gmbh, http://www.emlix.com, mailto:address@hidden
fon +49 551 37000-37, fax -38, keplerstraße 24, 37085 göttingen, germany

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