423: GRUB fixed

4.3beta1 testers have reported that a frugal installation of Puppy failed. There was a problem with installing GRUB.

If you already had GRUB installed and all that you needed to do was modify the /boot/grub/menu.lst file, then you would not have encountered this bug.

On the otherhand, if you ran /usr/sbin/grubconfig, either from the Universal Installer or the System menu, to install GRUB, then you would have hit the bug.

There was a typo at line 1003.

I fixed it, but then I discovered an awful bug that was in the original script -- it wasn't written by me, I'm just hacking on it!
The partition to which GRUB is to be installed gets mounted on /tmp/boot, however when grubconfig failed it also left the partition mounted. After fixing the script (line 1003) and rerunning the script, one of the first things it does is wipe everything in /tmp/boot -- meaning, it wiped my partition!

There are a couple of places in the script where this can happen. I have put in some safety checking, so this potential disaster is now fixed.

Fortunately I didn't lose a vital partition!

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Comments

Bad menu.lst
Username: 8-bit
Try this, you will see. Do a frugal install to a partition using the Puppy installer. When you run GRUB, let us assume you do not want to write the bootloader to MBR and instead select superblock of the partition. Grub will incorrectly write a menu.lst for a full install.

Tags: woof