installing without a /boot partition

scottro

Would some kind soul remind me of how to do this (the mailing list archives seem to be down)

The trouble is, that if one doesn't make a separate /boot partition, emerge system fails, as Grub is looking for it. What is the workaround--is it in /usr/portage/profiles/package.mask, or is that not there till later in the installation? (I don't need to install Grub, I'm actually booting from either RH's or FreeBSD's Grub, depending upon what I'm reinstalling at the time)

TIA

Scott

pcgod · Posted: Mon Apr 15, 2002 5:09 am Post subject:

Well, this solution worked for me... I dunno if it'll work for you though. I have seperate partitions for /, /usr, /home, and /var. I'm not a big fan of grub, so I decided to use lilo instead. Well, lilo wanted /boot to be either currently mounted, or in /etc/fstab. So, I copied all of the data out of /var, then remounted it as /boot, on top of the current /boot directory. Then emerged lilo. That went fine. Then I mounted it back to /var, copied all of that data into /boot, and moved /var's data back. I dunno what will happen when I have to upgrade lilo though. Probably not the solution you were looking for though
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-- PC^God --

Guest · Posted: Mon Apr 15, 2002 5:20 am Post subject:

Y'know, that would work--put something in /boot and then move it out again.

I might try that--but there was a more elegant (if that's the proper word) solution, that simply eliminated the problem.

Thanks though, that's an interesting workaround

Scott

Malakin · Posted: Mon Apr 15, 2002 8:05 am Post subject:

When I installed Gentoo I created one / partition and nothing else, used grub and never had any problems.... I did a stage 1 install if that makes any difference.

D33T · n00b Joined: 15 Apr 2002 Posts: 38

I did a stage 2 install, used hda1 (2.5 gigs) for / (including /boot) didn't mount or create anything different. I did create the dir, but that was it.

I also have hda4 which is like 16 gigs mounted at /pub. Everything worked fine. Follow Gentoo's page instructions, but ignore/change the boot part as needed. I didn't make a new one, but everything worked.

scottro · Posted: Tue Apr 16, 2002 1:10 am Post subject:

Thanks guys--in the early Gentoo installs, I was able to do that--ignore the instructions about a boot partition. Then, somewhere, a few months ago, I ran into the mentioned problems with it--emerge system getting messed up, as grub was looking for a /boot partition.

The next install, I'll try leaving it out again and seeing what happens.

Thanks very very much

Scott

lazlor · Guest

mkdir /mnt/gentoo/boot ? or /boot after you chroot

The directory existing is all I needed.