Quote:
Originally Posted by
coolatt
Someone please help me..I take backup very seriously.
When you edit grub.conf to add another boot option, you will have to re-build the stage-2 GRUB loader; which is why is a necessary step.
The GRUB stage-1 is just a 512 bytes system boot loader which is written at MBR (which is located in most PC based machine at track-0, sector-1 of their boot disk) and by the common disk architecture it can only be limited to 512 bytes (Till you actually get the newer 4KB sector disks).
GRUB stage-1 is what which actually let your machine to boot after POST (Power On Self Test done by BIOS) and subsequently loads the stage-2 which could be of different sizes (based on the total number of boot-menu displayed) and is actually responsible to rendered the boot menu options; Which you would need to create to get your new boot option menu displayed.
This needs to be built when you run 'grub-install'. This is specially true if you have GRUB version below GRUB-2 (under GRUB-2, there is a intermediate stage of stage1.5, loaded by stage-1, instead of stage-2 directly. Stahe-1.5 is basically enabler of basic file system reading capability to GRUB). Hence under GRUB-2 one can just modify the boot configuration and it reads the configuration to be rendered and displayed under stage -2 for you to boot your machine.
But there are issues:
1) If the disk file system is a custom one (i.e. not of common FS like UFS, ext2, ext3..4, reiserFS, etc.. or anything drives out of lineage) then the GRUB can't directly access the disk to access the boot.conf; hence won't give you the menu.
2) Incase, stage-1.5 is not present the still stage-2 gets loaded by stage-1 and in this case too the boot menu would not be rendered out of the latest configuration you saved into your grub.conf.
In both these cases (at least) you will have to perform the grub-install to create the grub images (both Stage-1 and Stage-2). It creates Stage-2 first and then the Stage-1 and inserts the starting sector number of the location of Stage-2 inside Stage-1 image. Hence Stage-1 can access and transfer control while boot strapping.
Hence in majority of the cases one should do the 'grub-install' except a few when your boot disk is formatted with most common Linux FS.
Hope that I answered your query.