Comments on: Installing GRUB onto a Disk Image

By: lgfang

lgfang — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 10:14:31 +0000

hi,
Thanks a million!
I just followed your instruction and succeeded on an redhat with grub 0.97

By: evan

evan — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 05:27:51 +0000

Yes, you’re correct. I haven’t updated these instructions for GRUB 2, which is substantially different from GRUB Legacy, so they likely won’t work.

By: Mohammad Shamma

Mohammad Shamma — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 03:23:43 +0000

Thanks a lot for this post. It was extremely useful.

For people who are following the steps outlined above two years after publishing the post, be aware of two new hurdles:

- Nowadays that there are two versions of grub, make sure to use the same version of grub-install and the grub that you install in the guest file system.
- grub-install didn’t work out as straight forward as described in this post. I speculate – though I haven’t verified – that grub-install have been updated in a way that it now resolves symbolic links. “/dev/mapper/hda” will be translated into some “/dev/dm-X”. When the latter is searched for in the “device.map” it is simply not found. You guys still interested in this post might need to hack the grub-install to disable resolving symbolic links.

Thanks again!

By: Erwin Bolwidt

Erwin Bolwidt — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 01:46:17 +0000

Installing Grub 2 onto a Disk Image:
http://blog.worldturner.com/worldturner/entry/creating_a_bootable_virtual_appliance

By: Xen to KVM (or physical, VMWare) Migration | daimons debian drivel

Xen to KVM (or physical, VMWare) Migration | daimons debian drivel — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 10:13:45 +0000

[...] http://ebroder.net/2009/08/04/installing-grub-onto-a-disk-image [...]

By: evan

evan — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 14:10:01 +0000

Like I said in the post,

I’ve only tested this on an Ubuntu Jaunty host so far, so I can’t guarantee that it works on Debian or even other Ubuntu versions, but I think it should. I’d love to hear if you have good or bad experiences on other Linux versions.

By: dieti

dieti — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 10:47:50 +0000

I tried to find a way to install grub2 on partitioned image file quite long. I was happy to see that you were successfull and hoped that it will work on my system too. Unfortunately it doesn’t…

I’m using Debian Lenny (Stable) and tried your procedure (and much more) with grub2 from Debian Squeeze (Testing) and Debian sid (Unstable) –> Everything was from stable release. I only used grub2 package from newer Debian releases.

If it’s really working on your system it might have something to do with grub2 version you are using… do you have further information about which grub2 version you are using?

There is something which is confusing me… On http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?27737 it seems that what we try to do is not yet possible and a known bug.

By: evan

evan — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 03:29:48 +0000

Yeah, I don’t like the scrollbars either, but it seemed more readable than either having the text flow off the side of the content bar or having things wrap.

How would you like to see it formatted?

By: Brian Topping

Brian Topping — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 03:20:33 +0000

Wow, what a timely post. I’ve always had a challenge on this one. Thanks so much!

FWIW, the horizontal scrollers, especially indented by the list, really take away from the readability of the content. Bless $DIETY for Firebug and the ability to reformat everything so I can ingest it all!