Installing SuSE 7.2 on an IBM ThinkCenter S50 (2): grub

Last time, we were left with a functioning but nongraphical SuSE Linux 7.2 Professional that needed its installation CD-ROM to be able to boot. Despite all my documentation, I didn’t find a list of Lilo errors that explained more than the “L” and the subsequent series of repeated “07”s that appeared the entirety of what the boot process delivered.

But I could still boot using the intallation CD. That way, logged in as root, from my command line, I typed yast2 and found myself in an ncurses screen. Choosing Package Installation focused my cursor on a search field, in which I typed: “grub”.

It was there. F10 asked me to insert CD #1 and a moment later I had a second bootloader on my machine. Grub legacy reads from /boot/grub/menu.lst, but to create that, I had to find out what grub would call my /dev/hdb3 and setup grub in that disks’s Master Boot Record (MBR). Grub has a shell:

1. # grub
2. grub> find /boot/grub/stage1 (hd0,0)
3. grub> root (hd0,0)
4. grub> setup (hd0)
5. grub> quit

Despite the prompt, line 3 is output. It told me what I needed to know to create a basic menu file:

1. default 0
2. timeout 10
3. title SuSE Linux 7.2 Professional
4. root (hd0,0)
5. kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb3 ro

I did a shutdown -r now and waited for the computer to reboot. When it did, it showed the grub menu. After I selected the only option I configured so far, it booted SuSE Linux 7.2 Professional with a default ASCII login.

After this, I added the SMP kernel (My Pentium 4 has Symmetric Multiprocessing) and the memory test to the grub menu.

1. # uname -a
2. Linux linux 2.4.4-64GB-SMP #1 SMP Fri May 18 14:54:08 GMT 2001 i686 unknown

Excellent.

One problem solved, one to go.