Am Mon, 29 Dec 2008 17:17:35 +0100
schrieb Thomas Bächler
This is interesting: On many BIOSes, grub 0.x is unable to find the CD drive and thus many people want us to use isolinux.
Personally i prefer isolinux as a "better" solution for ISO bootloader, but grub's advantage is the grub shell...
From what you write here, it seems that you can access the CD drive through another than the BIOS boot device method. It doesn't matter that access is slow, it only matters that we are able to load the kernel and initramfs on a greater number of machines. IMO, this is worth looking into.
You get these ata0, ata0,1, ata1 devices when adding the ata module to grub2 image. But the problem is: No one could say on which bus the users cdrom is (ata1, ata3,...). So the boot ends always in a grub2 shell instead showing the menu. User then must set it per Hand, like: set root=ata1 linux /boot/vmlinuz26 initrd /boot/kernel26.img boot And I've tested this ata method only on VMs. I'm not sure if on real machines the cdrom is realy detected as ata device (it wasn't detected as normal device cd0, cd1 on real hardware if using the biosdisk module). And i realy don't know why, on virtualbox,qemu it work's. If one would test - the way to make a grub2 bootloader image for mkisofs is: grub-makeimage -o mycore.img list_of_modules cat /boot/grub/cdboot.img mycore.img > myboot.img myboot.img could now used as mkisofs parameter (-b) like we does it with grub-legacy in mkarchiso. Grub2 modular design (and the available modules) have a great potential IMHO (not only that one could make it terrible blinking and colored, splash shit). But there is a lack on documentation IMHO.... Gerhard