Re: Protection of boot sector and embedded area

[Colin Watson]

On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 10:07:41AM +0100, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
> 2009/9/26 Colin Watson <address@hidden>:
> > At the moment, this is a recipe for GRUB becoming unusable, as the
> > interface between the core image and grub.cfg is not yet stable. As
> > such, I expect that the Ubuntu package will be changing to make this
> > harder to do by accident.
> 
> I suppose I have a special case.
> My HD already has a custom boot sector and embedded area doing
> something else. So I cannot install grub there at all.
> I am currently installing grub onto a usb stick and booting Linux from
> the usb stick, with the usb stick just doing the grub bit for me.
> I want to make sure that if I do automatic upgrades in ubuntu, it will
> never accidentally wipe the custom boot sector and embedded areas of
> my HD.
> I will manually do grub-install to update the grub on my usb stick.

In future I hope that it'll be possible to tell the package to use the
USB stick in a way which is safe - i.e. it definitely won't use the hard
disk. Of course, it might object to the USB stick going missing ...

In any case, run 'sudo dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc' and make sure no
devices are selected for the "GRUB install devices:" question.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden