Re: booting without filesystem

[Anselm Strauss]

On Apr 18, 2012, at 10:50 PM, Jordan Uggla wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 1:23 PM, Anselm Strauss <address@hidden> wrote:
>> thanks for the info. so that leaves me with the problem of how to boot a gpt 
>> partition where i have written the rescue image to. how do i get the mbr 
>> boot code to chainload the gpt boot partition?
> 
> The grub-mkrescue image is meant to be used as a full disk image, not
> dd'd to a partition. Why do you need a GPT label at all? What is your
> whole end goal with this?

i like the idea of having all the grub data contained in one image file. in my 
scenario i have some hardware where the disk is partitioned with gpt but holds 
just one partition with filesystem image files that are mounted read-only on 
boot. so for an initial install or update that is done from a live system 
booted from usb, i can then just replace the image files and write the grub 
image to the boot partition. otherwise i have to install all the grub files 
into the live system, copy them to the disk during installation and hope 
grub-install succeeds.

i thought it could be as simple as the mbr locating the gpt boot partition and 
chainloading it, and the boot partition containing a complete contained image 
of the boot loader.