Re: Does grub have to write to the boot device to boot a system?

[Paul Albrecht]

On Mon, 2008-03-17 at 17:07 -0700, walt wrote:
> Paul Albrecht wrote:
> > On Mon, 2008-03-17 at 12:14 -0700, walt wrote:
> >> Paul Albrecht wrote:
> >>> Hi,
> >>>
> >>> A question: Does grub have to write to the boot device to boot a system?
> >>> If not, is there an option to inhibit grub from writing to the boot
> >>> device?
> 
> >> If I knew your motivation for asking perhaps I could give you a better
> >> answer.
> 
> > More specifically, I'm booting linux with grub and have setup a separate
> > boot partition. After I boot the system, I md5sum'ed the boot device and
> > compared it with one saved from a prior boot.
> 
> That last bit needs more details.  Explain exactly what you mean by md5sum'd
> the boot device.  What exactly do you type on the commandline?

The boot device is the first primary partition so I use this command:

md5sum /dev/sda1

However, I found the problem ... nautilus mounts the boot partition
which updates the last mount time. Thanks!
 
> 
> > They're always different.
> >
> > I think grub is writing the boot sector because I md5sum'ed all the
> > files in my boot partition and they remain unchanged over a boot.
> >
> > Any idea why grub would be writing to the boot sector or is there some
> > other explanation?
> 
> 
> 
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Paul Albrecht