how to build a grub2 floppy with fs adventure

[adrian15]

        You can advice me to run easier commands.
Here is my experience.

I do not want to install grub2 in my production environment so I plan to
install into a floppy. The cat and dd way of install grub ( cat boot.img
core.img | dd of=foo.img seek=0 conv=notrunc  ) does not convince me
because I want to be able to read a filesystem from my grub2, i.e., the
floppy filesystem.

        I've finally decided myself to use grub-install command from the
compiled sources directory ( In my system it is:
/home/adrian/Desktop/gnu/grub2/grub2_2007_05_31


1st problem: no core.img
==========================
        The first problem is that no core.img is available once you run 'make'.
So I build one core.img like this:

./grub-mkimage -d ./ -o core.img

Once I have the come.img, I try to use grub-install, I finally found
this to work:


./grub-install --root-directory=/media/floppy --modules=*.mod
--grub-setup=./grub-setup --grub-mkimage=./grub-mkimage
--grub-mkdevicemap=./grub-mkdevicemap --grub-probe=./grub-probe /dev/fd0

where the /media/floppy is the place where I mount my floppy and, of
course, the floppy has to be mounted!!! (I think the grub-legacy's
grub-install did mount whatever was needed automatically although I am
not very sure about that.)


2nd problem: grub-probe and partmap module
=============================================
Then the grub-probe command complained about a partmap module not being
found so I decided to comment these lines from ./grub-install :


# Then the partition map module.
#partmap_module=`$grub_probe --target=partmap --device-map=${device_map}
${grubdir}`
#if test "x$partmap_module" = x -a "x$modules" = x; then
#    echo "Auto-detection of a partition map module failed." 1>&2
#    echo "Please specify the module with the option \`--modules'
explicitly." 1>&2
#    exit 1
#fi


3rd problem: grub-install did complain about not finding:
/usr/local/lib/grub/i386-pc
===========================================================
so I created it as a link to
/home/adrian/Desktop/gnu/grub2/grub2_2007_05_31 (compiled sources dir)



4th problem:
=============
 In order to fix the  /usr/local/lib/grub/i386-pc problem I invented
myself another option for grub-install called --pkglibdir so that I
could specify the directory myself.

However I think that other grub-install subprograms such as grub-probe
or grub-mkimage also tried to find that /usr/local/lib/grub/i386-pc
folder which it is annoying.

This is why I did the link trick.

It works!
=============

Finally I unmounted the floppy and tried to run it from qemu... it worked!



adrian15