Robert P. J. Day wrote:
On Fri, 19 Oct 2007, Dean S. Messing wrote:
I hope you capitalise the initial letters of your sentences, &c., in
your documentation. ?:-) Though what you say is worthy, I find it
hard to read because of the mental hiccups at the beginning of your
sentences.
Dean
P.S. I know it's faster to type w/o caps.
it also does a lot to alleviate carpal tunnel syndrome since you're
not constantly reaching for the shift key.
rday
Here is the new version of the Grub Manual. I think the caps are all
there. And you will hate my definition of a root.
There is nothing simple about what Grub does. It is the tiny software
that let us boot our Linux or Windows operating systems. At first look
at what it takes in the file /grub/grub.conf to boot a Linux system.
Figure 1:
title Fedora (2.6.22.1-41.fc7)
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22.1-41.fc7 ro root=LABEL=f7 rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.22.1-41.fc7.img
Figure 1 is a typical grub.conf entry from an actual working system.
Root is used twice in this entry and so first what is meant by root? The
root directory is the directory from which all other directories come
from in a file system.
Many people keep the entire Linux in one partition and in that case both
of the root point to the same partition. Others like to use more
partitions and there is a root directory for each of them and the root
calls point to different partitions.
It is 4 lines and each are required and they need to be perfect. Below
is taken from the above but actual things are replaced by numbers so we
can talk to each.
Figure 2:
title 1
root (2)
kernel 3,4
initrd 5,6
The title can be anything you want. Your computer often wants to use the
name of the kernel.
The root(2) written in grub form is the partition where the grub
directory and kernel and initrd files are found. A typical one will look
like root(hd0,3) which says a partition on the first hard drive and the
4th partition.
Kernel 3 tells grub where the files are in the root(2) partition.
Kernel 4 is the root= which is the partition where the kernel will find
the system. The partition is shown in normal terms like /dev/sda5.
For example look at this working grub.conf entry:
Figure 3:
title Fedora (2.6.22.9-91.fc7)
root (hd0,5)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.22.9-91.fc7 ro root=/dev/sda5 quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.22.9-91.fc7.img
From our work above we are not interested in the title but we want to
figure out what the root is. It says hd0,5 which means in words hard
drive 1, partition 6 which can be also written /dev/sda6.
Notice kernel and initrd and see they are just written as, for example
kernel /vmlinuz... This means the two files are in the root directory of
/dev/sda6.
The kernel line has root=/dev/sda5 which means the system to be boot is
in the /dev/sda5 partition even though the grub and kernel files are in
the /dev/sda6 partition.
So this example is one in which the boot and system partitions are
different. They can be on different hard drives too.
--
Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
Linux User
#450462 http://counter.li.org.
