[arch-general] A question specifically about upgrading an existing arch system from grub legacy to grub without UEFI or GPT

[Leonidas Spyropoulos]

On Jul 2, 2012 5:48 PM, "mike cloaked" <mike.cloaked at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 5:39 PM, gt <static.vortex at gmx.com> wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> OK if the general policy will be that for existing systems there is no
> need to upgrade grub in this situation that will be great - and if
> grub-legacy is in the AUR but no further development or changes takes
> place then that would satisfy me and there would be presumably no need
> to install the grub-legacy package from AUR? Just continue to update
> using pacman -Syu?

That's what I assume also. I'm using syslinux so I am not directly affected
by the upgrade, but always good to know.

Also since this could potentially break you system the update would be in
the news add well when it happens, along with info on how to proceed on
various situations.

>
> A further question then arises - let's say there is a system on which
> arch is not yet running and a new arch install needs to be done - but
> that the disk is pre-partitioned and has perhaps Windows XP or Windows
> 7 that the user would like to preserve with a dual boot system - and
> which perhaps has an OEM (HP) recovery partition between the MBR and
> the NTFS Windows partition with a post-MBR gap of 64 sectors. When
> installing arch when the default is grub2 - would it then need a
> larger post-MBR gap to achieve a successful (and bootable) install?
> (This is for the presumption that it has BIOS and MBR partitioning
> only - and again no GPT or UEFI) - or would an install along the lines
> that most people have been used to doing with existing install media
> work perfectly well?
>
>
>
> --
> mike c