rescue system

[thorgal]

Hello,

A couple of days ago, I updated all my machines to grub2. What the update was missing is a reconfiguration of debian package 'grub-pc'. A shame because this config tells grub2 which hard-drive to consider at boot time. So I ended up with unbootable machines, including my DAW PC!!

OK, so I went straight to my wife's laptop where I had installed a small debian sid partition. Her sister had given me a couple of 2GB USB sticks. So I picked one and did a quick 'debootstrap' which installed a minimalistic debian sid system on it. Once installed, I chrooted to it, installed grub, kernels and a few other things. I then tested the bootability of the USB key. All was fine so I booted my updated PCs with this USB key, chrooted to their internal hard-drives and ran 'dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc'. I selected which drive grub2 should boot from, and all was back tonormal pffffffffewwwww !!

I now have this USB key in my pocket all the time, a full bootable debian OS in less than 5cm

Note: I tried to boot my laptop with it. It loaded the nvidia 'nouveau' driver on the fly (without any xorg.conf) and went straight to X (gdm) at the right native resolution, with 3D acc enabled! "Chapeau bas" to the nouveau driver

[raboof]

booted my updated PCs with this USB key, chrooted to their internal hard-drives and ran 'dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc'. I selected which drive grub2 should boot from, and all was back tonormal pffffffffewwwww !!

Cool. I guess another way of doing it would be to use the grub commandline to specify the disk at boot time?

I now have this USB key in my pocket all the time, a full bootable debian OS in less than 5cm

Yeah, this saved my ass a couple of times too .

I tried to boot my laptop with it. It loaded the nvidia 'nouveau' driver on the fly (without any xorg.conf) and went straight to X (gdm) at the right native resolution, with 3D acc enabled! "Chapeau bas" to the nouveau driver

Cool! I haven't been having much luck so far with nouveau: for some kernels the screen just remains blank (even the consoles), with a very recent kernel (post-2.6.34) I can use the framebuffer at high resolution, but when I use the X driver the machine is unstable. A pity that this is all so hard to debug.

[thorgal]

hi raboof,

no, I could not edit the grub stuff at boot time because there was NO entry, and the syntax was unknown to me (grub2 entry style) ...

about the 'nouveau' driver, I had not expected things to happen this way. I just thought: OK, let's boot to X and see what happens (I had not even configured xorg at all and expected a prompt for selecting the GPU model, etc). So I was really surprised that things would go like they did. I suspect it is because of the tighter HAL influence over Xorg boot operations.