temporarily relocated grub install?

[J. Lasser]

Hello,

I was working on a project, making a bootable USB memory key with Grub,
and while I was eventually able to make it work, I'm hoping there's a
more efficient way of doing what I did, or that you might be induced to
add a feature or two to the code...

When you boot off of a USB device, the USB device automatically becomes
bios 0x80 (aka hd0 in Grub), regardless of the configuration at the time
that Grub was installed. But I didn't see any way to tell grub that the
soon-to-be boot device will be at a different location than it is at
install time.

Another situation where I've had this problem is building a hard drive
on a machine which isn't the ultimate target: I've worked in big machine
rooms, where hard drives are built via scripts, then put into the target
machine.

In this case, I was able to install to the ramdisk manually (I'm
remembering right now, as my notes aren't in front of me), and then at
first boot into grub, re-install it, then edit the config file. While
possible to do, this is a process that is difficult to automate, because
it relies on doing stuff with the drive in the final machine and then
configuring it. It would be wonderful to do something like I do with 
GNU Autoconf based software: run configure with --prefix= to point to
the final destination of the software, but then run make install with
prefix= pointing to the temporary install location.

If this isn't clear, please feel free to ask more questions... in any
case, I'd love to know if there is a way to do this now, or if you plan
on adding one in the future.

Thanks much for GRUB; as an open-source author myself, I know the
immense time and energy poured into a project with so few tangible
rewards. Keep up the good work!

Best,
Jon Lasser
-- 
Jon Lasser      
Home: address@hidden            |    Work:address@hidden
http://www.tux.org/~lasser/     |    http://www.cluestickconsulting.com
   Buy my book, _Think_Unix_! http://www.tux.org/~lasser/think-unix/

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