Re: Need Help on Removing Grub (Again)

[RD Lawrence]

"Yoshinori K. Okuji" wrote:

> At 04 Apr 2002 15:22:30 -0500,
> Mathieu Chouquet-Stringer wrote:
> > Correct. So I really don't get why you want to remove grub from hd1 if
> > you plan to boot from hd3... Boot from hd3 and don't give a damn about
> > hd1!
>
> You are right. Russell just said nonsense.
>
> Okuji

Many thanks to John Kingsly for posting pertinent  info on a promising
method for removing grub.

I'm not at liberty to divulge too many technical details, but I'm
figuratively looking at a set of machines whose bios's appear to ignore boot
flags and load the first boot loader encountered in the chain from hd0 to
hd(n) without any regard whatsoever for the state of the boot toggle in the
BR.   All the machines share some common features, including the bios,
recently installed ATA100 controllers, so-called "huge" ATA100 disks, and
all of them were initially built on linux 2.2.x platforms circa 2.2.14 when
both the ide drivers and fdisk had problems with drives exceeding 32G.  My
suspicion is that earlier versions of fdisk may have marginally corrupted
the boot records... perhaps causing the bios to think that all boot flags
are toggled on.  When I have spare time , I'm planning to definitively track
down the basic cause of the problem.  Meanwhile, some of my customers can't
seem to boot the last disk in the drive chain because grub was previously
installed on a lower numbered drive.  I'd like to solve their problem
without rebuilding a gezillion partitions (ie, many days of work) or
fiddling with the cable layouts (many hours of work) , and the EASY solution
is to UNINSTALL grub on lower numbered drives (a few minutes of work).   In
principle, as well as in practice, it would make sense for grub code to be
removable... regardless of the fact that the grub maintainers and some grub
users can't fathom the need for such a capability.   As I said before, the
notion of using DOS software (whether free or otherwise)  to accomplish this
is unacceptable to many linux users for both political and technical
reasons.