 |
 |
 |
 |
| Reviews, Rants & Things That Make You Scream The place for you to submit reviews of all those applications you use with Fedora. The Devs probably aren't listening, but some times you've just GOT to blow off steam or sing its praises. |
29th February 2012, 09:12 PM
|
|
Registered User
|
|
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Age: 72
Posts: 524
 
|
|
|
Annaconda and the MBR
Why is it, with multiboot systems (multiple drives and partitions), there is a tendancy to overwrite the MBR based on some drive that is usually not the intended.
Why can the installers not backup the MBR to /boot, and include a small program to restore the good mbr due to a faulty choice.
Why?
I have a 2 drive system, I revised the bios to boot from B, and installed our favorite distribution. But due to bios order (IDE drives), it went and installed the grub mbr on A, which was my Windows system. Now I did not have the windows xp cd in front of me, so I landed in trouble. The bios had the rule boot from B, but the installer went ahead and installed on A. With IDE drives, I guess that my B drive was the slave.
Can we recommend a convenience update to annaconda and grub2 to backup the mbr prior to an overwrite?
__________________
Leslie in Montreal
|
10th March 2012, 07:20 AM
|
|
Registered User
|
|
Join Date: Jul 2005
Posts: 206
 
|
|
|
Re: Annaconda and the MBR
Good point. Never thought of that personally. Have you filed a bug report anywhere on that?
|
11th March 2012, 05:16 AM
|
|
Registered User
|
|
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Age: 72
Posts: 524
|
|
|
Re: Annaconda and the MBR
Bugzilla change request submitted
__________________
Leslie in Montreal
|
11th March 2012, 06:00 PM
|
|
Registered User
|
|
Join Date: Dec 2009
Location: Dublin,Ireland
Posts: 101
|
|
|
Re: Annaconda and the MBR
Quote:
Originally Posted by lsatenstein
Why is it, with multiboot systems (multiple drives and partitions), there is a tendancy to overwrite the MBR based on some drive that is usually not the intended.
Why can the installers not backup the MBR to /boot, and include a small program to restore the good mbr due to a faulty choice.
Why?
I have a 2 drive system, I revised the bios to boot from B, and installed our favorite distribution. But due to bios order (IDE drives), it went and installed the grub mbr on A, which was my Windows system. Now I did not have the windows xp cd in front of me, so I landed in trouble. The bios had the rule boot from B, but the installer went ahead and installed on A. With IDE drives, I guess that my B drive was the slave.
Can we recommend a convenience update to annaconda and grub2 to backup the mbr prior to an overwrite?
|
The default is for Anaconda (and Ubuntu, Debian, SL and Mint installers, among others) to write Grub to drive A MBR, however Anaconda (like the other installers) allows you to choose where to store it.
You can store it at the beginning of a partition or at the beginning of another drive. Actually I never let Anaconda write the boot sector to its default place.
|
13th March 2012, 02:18 AM
|
|
Registered User
|
|
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Age: 72
Posts: 524
|
|
|
Re: Annaconda and the MBR
Yes, but when you have 5 tasks to juggle, sometimes one clicks the mouse a few seconds before realization takes place. Then it is too late.
Also, there may be a desire at some time to install a new mbr on another drive, without doing a full installation. In this latter case, one would want to restore the mbr.
__________________
Leslie in Montreal
|
| Thread Tools |
Search this Thread |
|
|
|
| Display Modes |
 Linear Mode
|
Posting Rules
|
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts
HTML code is Off
|
|
|
Current GMT-time: 02:20 (Wednesday, 19-06-2013)
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
