[gentoo-amd64] Re: Please suggest settings and flags in /etc/make.conf?

[Duncan]

Lie Ryan posted on Fri, 22 Jan 2010 19:02:24 +1100 as excerpted:

> On 01/22/10 15:01, Mark Knecht wrote:
>> Anyway, right now that's not my problem. This must be my 20th install
>> following the install guide but this time on this machine I am unable
>> to boot anything. Once again grub has bit me and it's acting like it's
>> blown away even windows, but I'm also not getting my grub.conf menu so
>> I don't know what's going on.
>
> There isn't many ways for booting to fail; it's either a faulty grub
> installation (e.g. forgetting to rerun grub-install), faulty grub.conf,
> or faulty kernel config. The easiest way to boot gentoo is to use
> genkernel; if you can boot using the genkernel, it means grub is
> properly installed.

I did a recent install to my (32-bit-only) netbook, using a chroot image 
created on my main 64-bit machine, following loosely the 32-bit chroot 
guide.

That ran into grub problems, because the thumb-drive I was using to boot 
and to transfer the image, is also the grub rescue boot for my main 
machine, using grub-static (because my main machine is no-multilib, but 
with the 32-bit chroot image).  I had installed normal self-compiled grub 
in the (main machine not directly booted) 32-bit image, and when I went 
to install that and do the grub-install on the 32-bit netbook, I ended up 
with, I believe, a mix of the stage-1 grub-static and stage-2 grub, which 
didn't work.  Either that or the self-compiled grub didn't like one of my 
CFLAGS or something, which is possible, but I think it was a mix of the 
two.

In that case, I simply decided that if grub-static was good enough for my 
64-bit main machine, and was booting the netbook fine from the USB stick 
(which has kernels and grub menu options for both the 32-bit and the 64-
bit machines), it was good enough for the 32-bit machine as well.  So 
back in the 32-bit chroot image on my main machine, I unmerged grub and 
merged grub-static instead.  After an rsync 32-bit image to thumb-drive 
and thumb-drive to netbook, and a grub-install of grub-static on the 
netbook, it worked.

So now I'm using grub-static everywhere.  If you're having an issue with 
grub, perhaps grub-static will work for you as well.  Since it's a pre-
compiled package, the binaries it contain are well tested on quite a few 
machines by now, so there's no wondering if it was somehow screwed up 
with strange cflags or something.  If it doesn't work and at least get 
you to a grub prompt, it's almost certainly because the grub-install step 
failed.

One of these days I'll try again with grub, but I expect when I do it'll 
be with grub2.  Until grub2, I think I'll leave well enough alone and 
stick with grub-static.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman