[Novalug] boot embarrassment : clue, please?

Beartooth beartooth@Beartooth.Info
Fri Feb 13 15:46:47 EST 2009


On Fri, 13 Feb 2009, Peter Larsen wrote:

> Sounds like some computer science presentation may come in 
> handy? A device is _anything_ that your computer talks to 
> outside the main board. Your hdd is a device, your USB, your 
> printer, your monitor, keyboard, mouse etc. It's something that 
> interacts with the computer's mainboard - either directly or 
> indirectly through a controller.

 	That helps, yes, thanks. But I have another problem, 
possibly mine alone as a refugee from pure mathematics: I've 
never been able to tell whether a device is hardware, or software 
that does something with it -- identifies it, talks to it, 
whatever. Sometimes it seems to be one, sometimes the other -- 
to the extent that one hardware browser seems to use an entirely 
different language than another.

> What grub wants to know is where to install. In /boot/grub 
> you'll find device-map. This is where you configure the map 
> between unix devices and the pseudo map that grub uses 
> (remember, grub runs before linux so it's sorta in it's own 
> little world). This is usually generated for you on install, 
> and in MOST installations your device would be hd0.
>
> This is mine on this laptop: (hd0)  /dev/sda
>
> What grub-install wants to know is the device - so you give it hd0. That
> should be it.  You can also give it the unix-path (/dev/sda in my case).

 	So when my tab did nothing, and I took a stab at 
substituting (hd0,0) into Varol's directions, I got lucky, right?

 	Incidentally, that particular machine, designed as a 
server, has two hard drives, which were originally locked 
together to make one clone the other. I got my Friendly Local 
Alpha Plus Technoid (FLAP) to unlock that. So would /dev/sdb have 
worked??

-- 
Beartooth Bookworm, Cantankerous Curmudgeon
I have never owned a television. Nor wanted to.



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