On Mon, Jul 02, 2012 at 05:26:23PM +0100, mike cloaked wrote:
I have been following the discussions in various places including on this list about the forthcoming change from grub to become grub-legacy and the default bootloader becoming grub2.
On all my arch systems I have grub with MBR partitioning, booting to BIOS initially - and none of my systems is modern enough to have UEFI instead of BIOS.
So I have been reading up on what I will need to do when grub2 version 2.00 appears in [core] - and how to successfully achieve the changeover. However I still cannot determine if it will be "necessary" to make sure that there is a post-MBR gap of 2MiB between the MBR and the first partition when the system will remain using MBR partitioning and grub2 will be the bootloader. So this applies to systems with no GPT partitions, and no UEFI.
In my systems that have been running some time some have 64 sectors to where the start of the first partition is, and others have 2,000 sectors which is about 1MiB - and I still don't know if grub2 version 2.00 will not work on those systems or not. I do know that other distros such as Fedora version F16 have systems running successfully using grub2 prior to version 2.00 with MBR partitioning and BIOS and boot perfectly well without the 2MiB post MBR gap. Perhaps this changes with the release of grub2 version 2.00?
Achieving a post-MBR gap of at least 2MiB will be a painful process as shrinking the first partition and then moving it towards partition 2 with an MBR partitioned disk is time consuming and not always successful in those systems where in the past I have adjusted the partitions on a drive. Maybe the recent versions of tools such as PartedMagic will cope better than it did a couple of years ago?
Can someone help out with a clear explanation please. I am usually pretty good with upgrades and preparation but this has foxed me! i.e. specifically for a BIOS-MBR hard drive using grub2 that it is vital to have a post-MBR gap of at least 2 MiB (where no GPT partitioning will be in use)?
Why do you need to upgrade to grub2? Even if grub-legacy won't be in the official repositories, it'll be in the AUR. Also, you don't need to reinstall grub every now and then, so i don't see the need to upgrade.