[vox-tech] grub not finding root partition

[Henry House]

På fredag, 20 maj 2005, skrev Peter Jay Salzman:
[...]
> I really wish grub used standard device names.  :(
> 
> root filesystem is on /dev/hda6
> boot partition is on /dev/hdb1
> 
>    title		Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.11
>    root		(hd1,0)
>    kernel		/vmlinuz-2.6.11 root=/dev/hda6 ro 
>    savedefault
>    boot
> 
> So I take it that "root (hd1,0)" doesn't mean "where to find root filesysetm",
> but rather, "where to find the kernel".
> 
> And I'm guessing that "root=/dev/hda6 ro" must be kernel arguments, which
> would mean "root=/dev/hda6" gives the location of the root filesystem.
> 
> If this is the case, then the word "root" has two meanings in the grub
> config file, which is really awful.  :(

Yes, that is exactly right. The line "root (hd1,0)" sets the Grub root,
which is the partition where the grub directory is located, which contains
the secondary stages of grub. Grub is too big to fit into the MBR so it must
load extra pieces of itself from the filesystem.

The "root=..." and everything else after the kernel-image filename are just
arguments to the kernel. Grub does not parse this appended text at all but
just passes it to Linux when booting. This is confusing when you are used to
Lilo because Lilo supports a lilo command "root=/dev/hda6" that appears on
a seperate line from the kernel, but is appended to the kernel arguments
when booting. One could equivalently write append="root=/dev/hda6" in
lilo.conf.

-- 
Henry House
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