mkbimage && grub && geometry -w

[Greg Buchholz]

   I've been trying to get a bootable El Torito HD image for booting off
of CD using grub.  I came across a script (mkbimage) which tries to make
such an image.  Everthing appears to work fine until it gets to the the
part where grub is invoked with the "geometry -w ..." option.  The error
looks like this...

#####
    GRUB  version 0.93  (640K lower / 3072K upper memory)

 [ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported.  For the first word, TAB
   lists possible command completions.  Anywhere else TAB lists the
possible
   completions of a device/filename. ]
grub> geometry (hd0) 278 16 63
drive 0x80: C/H/S = 278/16/63, The number of sectors = 280224, /dev/loop0
   Partition num: 0,  Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
grub> root (hd0,0)
 Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
grub> setup --stage2=/big/tmp/hd.image1/boot/grub/stage2 (hd0)
 Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... yes
 Checking if "/boot/grub/stage2" exists... yes
 Checking if "/boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes
 Running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)"...  16 sectors are
embedded.
succeeded
 Running "install --stage2=/big/tmp/hd.image1/boot/grub/stage2
/boot/grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+16 p (hd0,0)/boot/grub/stage2
/boot/grub/menu.lst"... succeeded
Done.
grub> geometry  -w  (hd0) 278 16 63

Error 11: Unrecognized device string

######

   I can't seem to find any documentation about the -w switch, and a quick
glance through the grub source didn't turn up any hints either.  Is the -w
switch vital to the whole process?  When I invoke the geometry command
without the -w, everything seems to go okay, but the image it produces
doesn't boot.  Any hints?  I'm using Linux 2.4.19, grub 0.93, and mkbimage
v 1.16 dated 2003/03/02 from...

http://corpus.polynum.org/admin/mkbimage

Any help would be appreciated.  I also noticed that the script is
hard-coded to use /sbin/sfdisk, but at least on my system (slackware 8.0),
sfdisk is located in /usr/sbin/.  Also, when there is more than one copy
of stage2 in the tar file, "find" locates them both and screws up the
logic for the rest of the script.


Thanks,

Greg Buchholz