Problem with pre-cooked GRUB floppy image

[distantvoices]

expect anything to be reliable and you'll be lost.

You know the german saying: verlass dich auf etwas[andere] und du bist verlassen. ? (kinda translation see my first sentence)

You are right, buffers should be flushed, but what if writing support for the filesystem in spe isn't present and the module isn't told to spill out a load of comments about that?

ARe you by any chance operating with a NTFS partition?

[Solar]

ARe you by any chance operating with a NTFS partition?

Thank you for your neverending trust in my 133t sk1llz. >:( ;D

[distantvoices]

wtf are leet skillz? *rofl*

No, I'm just asking for I'm curious and maybe can avoid some pitfalls in the future.

[durand]

proxy,

GRUB can install itself onto a floppy image quite easily. All you need to do is remap it's device by going:

device (fd0) ./floppy.img

This works for all the other devices that GRUB knows about.

Anyway, I made a little step-by-step guide on how to build a bootable GRUB floppy disk from scratch if anyone is interested. I've never used it myself but I'm sure it's mostly correct:

http://www.djm.co.za/spoon/grub/floppy.php

[Solar]

Yes, all this is fine and well, but if you're not Linux-hosted (and quite many here are not), GRUB won't even compile. That's why I offered a ready-made image.

I'd have made up a new one already if I weren't imprisioned behind this ... corp firewall on this ... corp computer that doesn't let me do a single ... thing. Tonight, promise.

[Solar]

A new image (with GRUB 0.95) is available at {deleted}. I'd like it if some of you test the image (MTools, Loopback, I don't have the stuff handy ATM), and if it works, have Pype update the file in the SourceForge download area.

[Candy]

Please don't link to that file elsewhere (e.g. in the FAQ), and download it only if you really intend to test it (instead of using it); I'd like to remove it again ASAP as that's my homepage - charged by bandwidth.

And now I'm first! Link at http://www.atlantisos.com/grub_disk.zip

Yes, I think you can remove the link. Got 2GB of data traffic a month none of which is used, so it's got a lot to grow to.

[Pype.Clicker]

just toyed 2 mins with "losetup" and loopdevice, but it seems to work fine

[Solar]

I would have provided a GRUB'ed bootable CD image, too, but that's caught in the same trap as the floppy image: It's there on the Linux side, but gone on the Windows side.

This sucks. ???

[Colonel Kernel]

I've downloaded the new image, and it works like a charm with mtools and VMWare. Thanks!

[Pype.Clicker]

added files through a loop-device mount of the image. Works like a charm too ... i'll mirror Candy's hosting

[Solar]

One thing just dawned on me: That disk image is basically a binary distribution of GRUB - and hence, we must at least add a readme.txt that tells people where to find the source code.

I'll look into the licensing later today...

[Pype.Clicker]

yup. I placed something alike in the 'release note' ... I'll crawl the gnu.org website for the exact source release and paste it there ...

[Colonel Kernel]

<bump/>

Any progress on the GRUB licensing issue/readme...?

[Solar]

Basically, the image is a binary distribution, and as such would have to come with source code. But even the GRUB FTP server itself ships precompiled binaries (grub-0.95-i386-pc.tar.gz) without as much as a README.txt.

That's why I didn't press the issue. I'll probably update the image with an appropriately worded README in a couple of weeks (when I did yet another attempt at switching to Linux), but - as a German proverb says - no prosecutor, no judge. I guess we all know the image contains GRUB, that GRUB is OSS, and where to get the source.