On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 3:22 AM, Dieter Plaetinck <dieter@plaetinck.be> wrote:
was this supposed to be an answer to my question? it's really not clear what your point is.
you asked if <insert list of three examples> could be done, i stated i used one of them *right now* ... i was indirectly implying it could be done and offering it forth as a partial answer. of course, i meant grub could be independently/safely installed to each raw device _backing_ a softraid ... but maybe i misinterpreted your 18 words, and you were reeeeally asking if grub could be installed on a blockdevice _resulting_ from the softraid assembly (or, for example, the creation of an LV), in which case the answer is also yes, because virtual machines do exactly this when passed an LV or any other block device (or raw file/etc) for use as a rootfs. does it make sense, generally, at install time, via AIF or any other? not in any useful way i'm aware; BIOS certainly won't find it -- maybe thru some crazy chainload from hell, idk -- but it *could* be safely done, in my understanding. quite frankly, i'm fairly certain you can go right ahead and install grub to whatever you want ... be a normal device, or a partition derived from kpartx scanning a loopback mounted file. i was simply non-authoritatively stating that every tool/scheme/standard/etc i've used from your examples and beyond appear to avoid clobbering the MBR, and i assumed you were speaking of the MBR as that is where the grub would reside ... unless we are talking about UEFI booting here, in which case the (required?) GPT layout sorta guarantees a place for bootloaders? soo ... maybe it's not really clear what your question is? to me, anyway. an entire block device formatted with an FS might be problematic -- IIRC btrfs has an unconditional gap at the start of the FS -- i'm not 100% on that, and i have no idea about other FS -- even `mkswap` will preserve the MBR unless your forcibly tell it otherwise. seems like the "correct" answer could vary, with a heavy lean toward "yes'm, it be ok". alas, if the preceding messages were completely useless in addressing your question, my apologies, for our time is lost forever :-( ... ever ... ever .... [ever] ... [ever] ... [...]
also what is an 1ehm-eye-bee?
my overly-exaggerated-and-ultimately-ill-fated attempt at expressionless, text-powered humor ... along with a general desire to avoid being pounced. http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-releng/2011-November/002255.html ... maybe we should start over. Howdy partna! i'm fairly new round these parts, but y'all seem like a nice crew to hang with. -- C Anthony