Re: completely stand-alone grub (legacy or new) boot floppy - how?

[John Lumby]

adrian15  wrote:

> . Try Super Grub Disk ( http://adrian15.raulete.net/grub/ ).

Haven't tried that yet although sounds interesting

> How to build your own Grub floppy.
>
> Take a floppy disk (fat or ext2)
> ...
> Run grub from a linux shell.
> Type the following commands:
> root (fd0)
> setup (fd0)
> quit
>
> And you're done. You do have the grub floppy.

Did that and it worked fine, thanks

Jeroen wrote:

> download the grub floppy image from
> ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub/grub-0.97-i386-pc.ext2fs.
>
> dd if=grub-0.97-i386-pc.ext2fs of=/dev/fd0

I also tried that and that also worked, thanks also.

In case anyone else tries this, a couple of comments:

.   the version downloaded from 
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub/grub-0.97-i386-pc.ext2fs has fewer subcommands 
than the one made by copying my own grub directory.   I don't remember which 
were missing and all the ones I need are there so not important for me
.  You may find that when you test your brand new grub boot floppy, (which 
you of course will always do), that it fails when trying to read a file.    
If so, get a newer/different floppy and try again.    I had several such 
failures on floppy disks which a running linux system could mount and read 
all files quite happily, so I'm guessing that grub has very limited 
error-handling for floppy disks - e.g. maybe it cannot handle reallocation 
of bad sectors or something like that?

John