How do I install FC16 with grub (not grub2)?

[duende]

Originally Posted by mannaggia

So now I have two grubs, the legacy one in /boot/grub/grub.cfg and the grub2 file in /boot/grub2/grub.cfg.

As a matter of fact, grub 2 is now used in the booting process, how can I decide if to use grub or grub2? Is it possible to configure this somewhere?

If grub2 works, why do you want to change it? (grub2-install has overwritten the bootsector, where before you had grub legacy)

Now that I am finally running Fedora 16, I have two main problems:

1) Gnome 3 failed to load

I don't know how to fix it, I've never had this problem.

2) yum is not working, whatever package I try to fetch yum searches in the following wrong repository:
Not Found : http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/...ata/repomd.xml
Trying other mirror.
Error: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository: fedora-firefox4. Please verify its path and try again

Remove /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-firefox.repo
You do not need it. This was only for Fedora 13 and 14. Current version of firefox is in the normal repo.

[mannaggia]

Thank you! I removed the old repo and istalled gnome 3 with yum install @gnome-desktop

gnome 3 it works now and I will stay with grub2.

[stoat]

Very well.

Originally Posted by mannaggia

I hope I did not damnage somenthing.

You didn't.

My view of it goes like this. Boot.img is written into the MBR. It's tiny. It can't do much. It's only job is to find and load core.img. Boot.img cannot access filesystems. It has to find core.img by its sector address which is given to boot.img at the time all of this stuff is being installed. The preferred place for core.img is to embed it in the normally empty and unused sectors between the MBR and the first partition. Core.img varies in size, but it's always much larger than boot.img because it does more things. Core.img can access filesystems. Core.img loads modules, reads grub.cfg, creates the menu, and boots whatever is chosen in the menu. For you, core.img would not fit into the sectors between the MBR and first partition. Forcing grub-install to proceed with the installation anyway makes it skip trying to embed core.img there and gives boot.img the sector address of the file /boot/grub/core.img in the filesystem. Boot.img cannot access a filesystem, so it still has to rely on the sector address of the file to find /boot/grub/core.img. That works just fine, too. But the difference with using the file /boot/grub/core.img is the potential for that file to be moved to different sectors and bust the boot loader. That never happens when core.img is embedded in the sectors after the MBR. That, IMO, is the reason for the ruckus when you tried to re-install GRUB and had to force it. Legacy GRUB had a similar situation, only it never stopped to discuss the matter. So, IMO, you should be fine. And if the boot loader gets busted someday, then re-install the boot loader again.

[mannaggia]

thanks for this explanation!

[Seatche]

I found that Fedora 16 live requires Grub2, and you cannot boot FC16 Live using just Grub.

Here's my workaround to getting FC16 Live to boot from my harddrive, by chainloading grub2 from grub.
I installed the Grub2 RPM package, without running grub2-install, so that my MBR still had my old grub.
I installed syslinux, and ran the FC16 live script, "livecd-iso-to-disk", specifying sda2 as the destination.
I added an entry to my grub.conf for calling FC16 live's grub2 menu on sda2:
title Fedora 16 Live, GRUB2 Chainloaded on sda2
root (hd0,1)
chainloader +1
boot

The same thing would apply for a new install of FC16, if you require grub for your older Linux installations.
When you install Fedora 16 to your specified partition, update your original grub.conf with a new entry to chainload the partition of the newly installed FC16's GRUB2.
You may need to set that partition's boot flag using parted for this to work.