Re: Error: Unknown Filesystem

[Petro]

Thanks to all those who responded.

> From: Chris Murphy <address@hidden>
>> Petro <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name  Flags
> > 1      1049kB  200MB   199MB                boot  bios_grub
> > 2      200MB   16.2GB  16.0GB  ext3         data
> This is on UEFI hardware? Because a 200MB partition formatted vfat, the flag 
> should be boot to make it an EFI System partition. Whereas if this is BIOS 
> hardware, the flag bios_grub is for the GRUB core.img and only needs to be 1MB, 
> not 200.

Nah, it's on a USB stick.
> > address@hidden ~]# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/1/
> > mount: you must specify the filesystem type
> So I think what you've got is BIOS hardware, and upon installing GRUB, it 
> overwrote sdb1 with the core.img which doesn't require a file system at all. 
> And isn't mountable.
>
> Your grub.cfg and associated mod files, etc need to go on sdb2. That's what you 
> should mount and point the root directory to.
<snip the rest>

Yeah, so now I see what's going on.

I mis-understood the documentation, and apparently in the process messed 
up my VM something awful, so I don't have clear records any more.

However for the masses who will be searching the internet for **JUST** 
this response:

I am attempting this on plain "BIOS" hardware, and thought that the 
Grub2 stuff needed to reside on a FAT32 partition.

I also understood from the documentation that Grub would stuff itself 
into the space between the initial boot loader and the first partition.

Which it will do if you either (a) line things up right, or (b) use 
--force.

With grub-install --boot-directory=/mnt/grub/ --force /dev/sdb  and a 
/grub/grub.cfg that looks a lot like:

menuentry "SL EL" {
    loopback loop /iso/SL-63-x86_64-2012-08-02-INSTALL-DVD.iso
    linux (loop)/isolinux/vmlinuz
    initrd (loop)/isolinux/initrd.img
}

I get a Grub menu with "SL EL" on it.

Of course, when I select "SL EL" I get a blinky cursor and nothing else.

If you have any ideas if what I'm doing wrong here, I'd appreciate it, 
otherwise it looks like I've figured out *this* problem.

Thanks.
Petro.
:wq