grub-0.5.96.1 grub-install problems with /dev/fd0

[Dirk Herrmann]

Hello GRUB developers,

nice work so far, and very good documentation also!


However, I have had the following problems:

* The sed commands in line 79 and 81 go across two lines, but these
  lines are not ended with `\`
* giving '(fd0)' as the argument does not work.  Again, the above
  lines seem to be the problem, as they do not deal with the floppy
  strings.

Further, there is a sentence in the documentation that I do not fully
understand (the first sentence in the section 'Installing GRUB using
grub-install'):

   Unfortunately, if you do want to install GRUB under a UNIX-like OS
   (such as GNU), invoke the program `grub-install' as the superuser
   ("root").

What's unfortunate?  I first thought that you would have to be root to
install GRUB, but after fixing the problems described above, I was
able to install grub as suggested in that section:

     # mke2fs /dev/fd0
     # mount -t ext2 /dev/fd0 /mnt
     # grub-install --root-directory=/mnt '(fd0)'
     # umount /mnt

even as an ordinary user (having floppy access, however).  Thus, I think
you intended to say something else with that sentence.


In any case, I'd like to say 'thanks' for your efforts:  More than once
GRUB has helped me to get my system to run when I was experimenting with
different constellations of hard disks to find out whether one of them is
damaged.  GRUB makes this easy, because the command line interface allows
to change the hardware combination and just reboot.  Very nice software!

Best regards
Dirk Herrmann