Re: completely stand-alone grub (legacy or new) boot floppy - how?

[Jeroen Dekkers]

At Thu, 04 May 2006 13:20:31 -0400,
John Lumby wrote:
> 
> I want to make a grub boot floppy that is completely self-contained up to 
> the capability to present a prompt and accept and run any grub command (e.g. 
> setup).      I have tried diong this in the past using one of two methods 
> but what I have found is that although the boot floppy works fine if the 
> same disk is in hd0 as was there when I created the floppy, if that disks is 
> not there and some other disk without the relevant stage files (stage 2 is 
> it?) is there instead, all that happens when I boot the floppy is the single 
> word
> GRUB
> appears on the console and then nothing.
> 
> I can't remember exactly how I set up the floppy (actually I have two and 
> think I may have either
>     run setup (fd0) from a grub prompt while running grub from booting the 
> disk
>     from running system:   run                 grub-install /dev/fd0
> I know I have tried both of these methods but not sure on which floppies 
> that I've tried
> but I suspect that neither of these makes a completely self-contained boot 
> floppy.
> 
> I am not asking for the final stage of finding a configfile on floppy - I 
> just want a full grub subcommand environment without requiring to read 
> anything from anywhere else.
> 
> Can someone please tell me how.- preferably both legacy and new grub2 if 
> different.

The easiest way is to just download the grub floppy image from
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub/grub-0.97-i386-pc.ext2fs. Then you do:

dd if=grub-0.97-i386-pc.ext2fs of=/dev/fd0

And you should have your bootable floppy with grub.

Jeroen Dekkers