Booting HD without grub

[E.S. Rosenberg]

If I understand you correctly you want to make the system bootable
again but you first want to do a dry run to make sure it works...

So you take a modern livecd, a big external hdd and create a dd
imagefile of the current disk and now you can play all you want even
in a virtual environment without ever having to fear for your data.

Alternatively you again take a second hard disk and install grub on it.

The grub CLI may be a real PITA but it's also crazy powerful once you
get the hang of it....

BTW. for the past I don't know how many years now both IDE and SCSI
drives are handled by the kernel as sdX.... (same subsystem if I'm not
mistaken, but I may be very wrong don't know enough about the kernel
internals, am sure someone on the list does.)

Regards,
Eliyahu - אליהו

2013/9/12 Eli Marmor <eli at netmask.it>:
> The simple answer is "because I'm afraid".
> And more detailed:
> I assume that anything that can be done through the MBR, can be done also
> manually through a live CD.
> So I want to see it booting, and then I'll set it permanently.
> I'm sure that it is possible, because it has been done for years by another
> disk (the MBR of that disk booted the current disk).
> By the way: there is no SCSI, just IDE.
>
> Thank you!
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 7:34 PM, Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Why do you want to boot it just once? Perhaps if we knew what you were
>> trying to do, we could suggest other alternatives. For instance, if the
>> disk is small, you could ddrescue it off to an image, dd that image
>> onto a larger or same disk, and use that disk in another computer as
>> sda.
>>
>> Or you could copy the Mandrake partition to a partition made of unused
>> space on SDA, modify the /etc/fstab to either rename the devices, or
>> better mount by UUID, and then add that partition to your current grub.
>>
>> I've seen things like you mention, where the live CD can boot only sda.
>> And Grub really is a PITA.
>>
>> SteveT
>>
>> Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
>> Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance
>>
>>
>> On Thu, 12 Sep 2013 13:56:05 +0300
>> Eli Marmor <eli at netmask.it> wrote:
>>
>> > Thank you Shlomi.
>> > No success, so far.
>> > I'll give more details, so if anybody can help, I'll be grateful.
>> > I'm also willing to bring the system to anywhere and/or pay:
>> >
>> > I have a full Linux system (old Mandrake) on hdd4,
>> > including /boot/vmlinuz, /boot/initrd.img, etc. (all the system on
>> > one partition). It has been booted for years from another disk.
>> > The file system is correct (according to fsck), and mountable (when
>> > the computer is booted from a live-CD).
>> > All I want is to boot it once, manually, without writing any MBR, but
>> > from a live CD.
>> > Any live-CD and grub has its own limitations, for example some of them
>> > can't reach hd3,4 (although they can mount hdd4!).
>> > I believe that for some of you it's a matter of minutes.
>> >
>> > Anybody can help?
>> >
>> > Thanks a lot,
>> > Eli Marmor
>> >
>> >
>> > On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 8:38 PM, Shlomi Fish <shlomif at gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> > > Hi Eli,
>> > >
>> > > On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 7:37 PM, Eli Marmor <eli at netmask.it> wrote:
>> > >
>> > >> Hi,
>> > >>
>> > >> I have an old PC (with an old Mandrake), and its grub screwed up.
>> > >> I want to boot it WITHOUT re-installing the grub (I don't want to
>> > >> touch the HD till I see it works again, but boot it manually from a
>> > >> Live-CD/floppy).
>> > >> How can I do it from a Live-CD or floppy?  (both work under this
>> > >> PC). What Live-CD/floppy is recommended for this purpose?
>> > >> Can I do it from the boot prompt?
>> > >>
>> > >
>> > > The GRUB command prompt allows you to enter any arbitrary GRUB
>> > > command and boot the machine however you like. So if the LiveCD
>> > > contains a working GRUB installation, you can use the GRUB command
>> > > prompt there to boot it like you would boot from the hard disk.
>> > >
>> > > Regards,
>> > >
>> > > -- Shlomi Fish
>> > >
>> > >
>> > >>
>> > >> Thanks,
>> > >> Eli Marmor
>> > >>
>> > >> _______________________________________________
>> > >> Linux-il mailing list
>> > >> Linux-il at cs.huji.ac.il
>> > >> http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
>> > >>
>> > >>
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > --
>> > > ------------------------------------------
>> > > Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/
>> > >
>> > > Electrical Engineering studies. In the Technion. Been there. Done
>> > > that. Forgot a lot. Remember too much.
>> > >
>> > > Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post -
>> > > http://shlom.in/reply .
>> > >
>> > > _______________________________________________
>> > > Linux-il mailing list
>> > > Linux-il at cs.huji.ac.il
>> > > http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
>> > >
>> > >
>>
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