Who has mastered Grub2?

[ukchucktown]

Re: Who has mastered Grub2?

I finally installed 9.10 64 bit yesterday on my Macbook Pro. I don't have any personal experience with grub2. I'm curious if I can replace rEFIt with grub2. I'm not sure if I should give it a go and start experimenting or wait a little while. Has anyone tried grub2 for EFI-based dual boot scenarios?

Cheers, UK

[Qqmike]

Re: Who has mastered Grub2?

re Reply #14:
Slow boot times with multiple drives and multi-boot:
Bug #420933
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s.../?loggingout=1

[GreyGeek]

Re: Who has mastered Grub2?

On my Sony VAIO notebook I have two partitions. A 32bit Jaunty is on one and a 64bit Karmic is on the other. The last time I tried to use the "Edit Grub" option in Systemservices it added an empty menu.lst file to /boot/grub on my 64bit partition. I can use "update-grub" without problems. I never edit grub.cfg but use synaptic instead to remove linux-headers-* files and then run update-grub to clean the boot menu of unwanted kernels.

[MoonRise]

Re: Who has mastered Grub2?

re Reply #14:
Slow boot times with multiple drives and multi-boot:
Bug #420933
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s.../?loggingout=1

unfortunately I seem to be affected by this one. I have also had on occasion mostly after a major updates on a reboot to have the internal speaker on the MoBo go haywire. What I mean by that is it will start beeping at a high rate before actually rebooting. Again, only after major updates that had GRUB and kernel updates. Wonder if there is a connection.

[flarson]

Re: Who has mastered Grub2?

I used to have the problem you describe. What is happening is that grub2 is not finding a boot disk and is dropping to the grub prompt, but leaves off the actual prompt so you get

GNU GRUB version 1.97~beta4

[ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For the first word, TAB
lists possible command completions. Anywhere else TAB lists possible
device/file completions. ]

In my case and a few others this was fixed by having the first system disk be the one the BIOS points to and having grub2 installed there. I was surprised that this worked for me because I thought I had that situation already, but changing the BIOS fixed it.

@dibl
I didn't see your post earlier but it looks to me like you were still using the old 0 based notation for partitions. grub2 uses 1 based numbering for partitions and 0 based numbering for disks.

[Qqmike]

Re: Who has mastered Grub2?

@mando_hacker Yours was a different "bug" than the one I linked. Mine is caused by GRUB cycling through UUID checks (and maybe disks) (so it is believed). I does boot, but only after prolonged delay, mine 70 seconds, some others report several minutes.

In any case, it is beta now and so not final, so anything goes, but in the final, no user should be expected to do musical chairs with their disks. The bootloader should work, or it's not a bootloader.

[flarson]

Re: Who has mastered Grub2?

I think they are the same. Mine would boot after about 20 seconds at the grub prompt. It would also try to boot from the floppy after putting up the boot prompt.

[Qqmike]

Re: Who has mastered Grub2?

but ...
"... What is happening is that grub2 is not finding a boot disk and is dropping to the grub prompt..."
that ain't the case for the bug in the link.

[flarson]

Re: Who has mastered Grub2?

To quote your link

"[minimal BASH-like..." message

is the grub prompt. Why does grub drop to that prompt, rather than showing the boot menu? Are you saying that because no one in that bug report refers to it that way that they are not seeing the same thing?

[dibl]

Re: Who has mastered Grub2?

@dibl
I didn't see your post earlier but it looks to me like you were still using the old 0 based notation for partitions. grub2 uses 1 based numbering for partitions and 0 based numbering for disks.

Yes, there's a case of that in my post, but I think it's a typo -- I did study up on the Grub2 FAQs before I started fiddling with it, and picked up on the change in partition numbering style. I confirmed to my satisfaction (at the time) that there was a bug that was interfering with the addition of other OS's to the boot menu -- not sure whether it was something about my multi-disk setup, or what. I had to resort to re-installation of a legacy Grub setup to restore my ability to dual boot. I keep monitoring the Grub2 posts, here and on Ubuntu Forums -- it looks like there have been improvements to it. I'll probably try it again the next time I install an OS.