Re: Protection of boot sector and embedded area

[Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko]

James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
> 2009/9/26 Colin Watson <address@hidden>:
>   
>> On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 09:28:12AM +0100, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
>>     
>>> Is there a setting for grub-install/grub-setup where, if set, will
>>> never actually over write the boot sector and embedded area of my HD?
>>> I don't mind grub.conf being written to, I just do not want the boot
>>> up executables written to.
>>> For example, if I have an Ubuntu install, and the grub package gets
>>> upgraded, is there a way to stop the automatic update from attacking
>>> the boot and embedded area of my HD?
>>>       
>> At the moment, this is a recipe for GRUB becoming unusable, as the
>> interface between the core image and grub.cfg is not yet stable. As
>> such, I expect that the Ubuntu package will be changing to make this
>> harder to do by accident.
>>
>>     
> I suppose I have a special case.
> My HD already has a custom boot sector and embedded area doing
> something else. So I cannot install grub there at all.
>   
It's generally a bad idea to chase grub out of MBR+embed area. It often
results in unreliable configurations. Could you detail your usecase so
we can seek for a bettere solution?
> I am currently installing grub onto a usb stick and booting Linux from
> the usb stick, with the usb stick just doing the grub bit for me.
> I want to make sure that if I do automatic upgrades in ubuntu, it will
> never accidentally wipe the custom boot sector and embedded areas of
> my HD.
> I will manually do grub-install to update the grub on my usb stick.
>
>   
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