Arch Linux

sren

Member

Registered: 2011-10-25

Posts: 1

can grub go on empty hardrive?

I've got a new os setup . I booted into it with gparted live cd. how can I install grub on the mbr from this point? All the documentation I can find seems to assume you already have a linux installation installed. At the moment my partition layound is /dev/sda and with a partition table created with gparted live to msdos. i know grub requires menu.lst and other load files to be located SOMEWHERE so i can create /dev/sda1 as ext as the "grub partition". but how can i do that without a host linux system?

synthead

Member

Registered: 2006-05-09

Posts: 1,337

Re: can grub go on empty hardrive?

You'll need to have a GRUB-compatible filesystem ready to store some GRUB-related stuff, like a 50MB ext2 partition at least.  Mount it to a directory called "boot", like /media/temp/boot in example, then run something like:

grub-install /dev/sdX --root-directory=/media/temp

I believe that you can also install GRUB within a GRUB bootloader, but most Linux CDs use isolinux instead of GRUB.