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Standard GRUB will not boot a BFS partition. I'm looking at my Ubuntu 7.10 installation right now, and there is no bfs_stage1_5 file. e2fs, FAT, JFS, Reiser and XFS, but no BFS.
So whatever you're doing, you are not using the standard GRUB that comes with Ubuntu.
The version of GRUB that comes with Syllable will also not boot BFS. Hence why I said "GRUB won't boot it".
Vanders, I'm sure you know this, so just so no one gets the wrong idea here: GRUB doesn't have to understand B(e)FS to boot BeOS or Haiku. You simply use GRUB's chainload feature, as described in
http://www.osnews.com/files/syllable-install.html
This way GRUB loads and hands off to BeOS/Haiku's loader which is embedded in the partition's own boot record. You can use the command 'makebootable', but the BeOS (and future Haiku) installer should already have done that for you. (This is not BeOS's MBR menu known as 'bootman' - two separate things. Bootman, if you choose to install it, loads the partition boot record code put there by 'makebootable'.)
The only reason for GRUB to have intrinsic knowledge of a certain filesystem is to host GRUBs menu settings and additional components -within- the filesystem of a specific partition, like the one you've got Linux or Syllable on. Without this intrinsic knowledge of a certain filesystem, a boot menu can't fit much more than chainloading in the tiny space of a disk's Master Boot Record. In my opinion chainloading is cleaner than sort of spilling over into a partition, but people seem to enjoy bloat. ;P The only good reason I can see for doing it might be being able to load different operating systems with multiple presets of boot parameter for each.
You don't need BFS support to boot a BFS partition. How else would any PC boot BeOS at all? Even the Windows bootmanager can boot BFS partitions. For that to work, the first block of the partition contains the actual boot code (which then contains support for BFS). That code gets written to the partition if you invoke "makebootable" in BeOS. I think the feature of the bootmanager is called "chain loading". (chainload=1 in the grub config? Just be careful to not make logical partitions "active".)







Member since:
2006-01-03
What the heck are you talking about? I added Haiku to my GRUB with Ubuntu and it works fine, and Haiku uses bfs.