I've previously been using Ubuntu v10.10 as my maintenance OS for managing Grub2, but since discovering that Grml's LiveCD environment includes a recent Grub2 release I thought I'd give that a go.
Grml is using Grub2 version 1.99~201012221-1" (same as "beta0" right?)
While Ubuntu 10.10 reports "1.98+20100804-5ubuntu3".
I have my "master grub partition" - which contains my bootable ISOs, persistence files for some of the LiveCDs, and a /boot/grub/ folder. This folder has the results of previous "grub-install" commands run from Ubuntu, as well as a manually maintained grub.cfg. There is no OS in this partition (other than the LiveCD ISOs). Even though under most distros the drive containing this partition comes up as /dev/sde, Grub2 sees it as (hd0), so I've got it set up as my boot device.
I also have a second drive (/dev/sdf or (hd1) via grub) set up identically, also bootable and use rsync to back up the partitions' contents after any significant changes (I originally tried to do this as a RAID1 mirror, but ran into problems with some LiveCDs mounting the persistence files from the member partition, breaking the array).
Booting into Grml, I map the first drive's grub partition to /mnt/g201, so the grub folder is now at /mnt/g201/boot/grub and run:
grub-install --boot-directory=/mnt/g201/ /dev/sde
At next boot, the loader brings me to a blank grub prompt (not the rescue grub, a full working grub2 environment with root=(hd0,msdos1) as it should be
To figure out what the boot loader is doing, I run boot-info-script (excellent tool BTW, should definitely be added to Grml!) and it tells me
"Grub 2 is installed in the MBR of /dev/sde and looks for we."
As opposed to my second drive, for which says (much more informatively)"
"Grub 2 is installed in the MBR of /dev/sdf and looks on the same drive in partition #1 for (,msdos1)/boot/grub."
The latter being normal for a correctly working boot loader, at least as far as Ubuntu is concerned.
I then have a look at my first drive's grub partition, and see that my grub-install command from Grml resulted in a whole new grub folder directly under the root /mnt/g201/grub, rather than updating the existing /mnt/g201/boot/grub
So I figure this is why the boot loader isn't loading the grub.cfg from my usual /boot/grub - presumably it's looking for a grub.cfg in /grub and of course there isn't one there.
So this time I run the command as follows:
grub-install --boot-directory=/mnt/g201/boot /dev/sde
Note the path spec'd to the /boot parent of where grub should go, rather than the root of the device as is usual under Ubuntu.
This time the result file for the boot-info-script tells me
"Grub 2 is installed in the MBR of /dev/sde and looks for le." (as opposed for "we" before - WTF?)
But the drive now boots up properly into my boot.cfg.
So I was able to get it working.
Is this an intended behavior change for grub-install, that --boot-directory is now supposed to specify the immediate parent of where I want the /grub folder to go?
I hope not, because having a canonical /boot/grub location seems to be helpful in troubleshooting - letting the user put it anywhere s/he likes seems an unnecessary complication. . .
It also seems that many of the entries in my grub.cfg no longer are working, so rather than troubleshooting all the other changes between these two Grub2 version, at this point I'm going back to Ubuntu's and hopefully these problems will go away.
If I do want to come back to this later, is there a good location for documentation on things the end user needs to be aware of regarding differences between 1.98 and 1.99?
Thanks in advance. . .