Re: Installing grub into the mbr of a disk image

[Franklin PIAT]

Hello,

On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 14:53 +0200, Iwan Vosloo wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> I'm trying to build a disk image, partitioned and with grub (0.97 on
> ubuntu gutsy) in its mbr. But my installing grub always overwrites the
> partition table.
> 
> The idea is to boot the disk image in a VM, then to land in grub's
> commandline and take things from there. What am I misinderstanding?

Can't you just install linux within that partition, then get it to
install grub ?

> These are the steps I follow to create a typical 4GiB image:
>  1) Create the disk: dd if=/dev/zero of=/diskimage bs=516096c count=8000
>     (from: http://www.osdev.org/osfaq2/index.php/Disk%20Images%20Under%
> 20Linux )
>     (assuming disk geometry of 8000 cylinders, 16 heads, 63
> sectors/track, 512 bytes/sector) 
>     
>  2) Partition the disk:
>     parted /diskimage -s  mklabel msdos
>     parted /diskimage -s  mkpart primary ext3 32257B 1040cyl 
>     parted /diskimage -s  mkpart primary linux-swap 1041cyl 9230cyl
>     parted /diskimage -s  mkpart primary ext3 9231cyl 100%

looks correct.

>  3) In order to install grub, I do:
>     (from
> http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#Creating-a-GRUB-boot-floppy 
> )
>       dd if=/usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/stage1 of=/diskimage bs=512 count=1
>       dd if=/usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/stage2 of=/diskimage bs=512 seek=1

You can't do that for hard disk.