grub weirdness

eclipsed · n00b Joined: 19 May 2002 Posts: 26

I'm not sure if this is a grub issue or some other strangness but if I mount /dev/hda1 (where grub is installed) the directory tree seems to be endlessly dupilcated. For instance I cd'ed to /boot and saw that ls returned the same result as before. A quick pwd showed that I was indeed in the /boot/boot directory. I cd to boot about 30 more times and never saw the end of the tree. Is this some grub sprawl or some other issue. It doesn't seem to be causing any problems, but I'd like to know what the reason for it. TIA.
-Adam

Scandium · Posted: Mon May 27, 2002 8:59 am Post subject:

Yes, that happens for everyone

Because in /boot there is a symlink which points to /boot again and again so you can access /boot/boot/boot as often as you like.
But don't ask me if that is grub-related or something - Before I started using Gentoo I always had used lilo, this endless thing came to my attention when I installed Gentoo but I don't know wether it's wanted nor if it can cause any problems (<-- don't think so that would be unrealistic)

tux-fan · Posted: Mon May 27, 2002 11:58 am Post subject:

I think grub can't see the mount-point /boot it only sees hd0,0 (dev/hda1 in your example). So for grub it is a (hd0,0)/boot/... but for your Linux it is /boot/boot/...
The symlink ln -s boot . keeps the things as easy as possible for you because U can edit the data directly under /boot, not /boot/boot.

fghellar · Posted: Mon May 27, 2002 3:43 pm Post subject: Re: grub weirdness

Guest · Posted: Tue May 28, 2002 1:17 pm Post subject: It's a simple hack

I think it's a simple hack so that when you boot the kernel it doesn't matter if your current directory where you are mounted is / or /boot, you can still reference /boot/bzImage and it will point to the same place.

Phillip.

craftyc · Guru Joined: 23 May 2002 Posts: 443 Location: Behind You.