William L. Maltby wrote:
On Fri, 2008-08-29 at 13:58 -0400, Mark Belanger wrote:
Given that I have a machine with possibly multiple disks, each of which is bootable(has an MBR)....
Is there a command that will query the BIOS and tell me which disk is the default boot disk. BTW - this is x86.
The goal is to remotely reboot the workstation into the desired disk(which contain different centos versions).
Having said all that, why do you want to do it that way? It's much better (and easier for you to accomplish your stated goal) by setting up a single (and a backup, *maybe* - there's a couple more tricks needed for that if using LVM) boot partition that loads and handles the differences you need to support. Make your boot partition(s) larger, if needed, to support multiple versions of kernels, initrd, config.* and system maps. The using the "default" command of grub you can point to a boot configuration that will load different kernels, pass different initrds, mount different roots and even load different OSs (see the "chain" descriptions in "info grub").
Thanks for the info - very detailed.
I'm trying to find a one-size-fits-all method that is grub based. We have many different configurations here so I want something that can work with any of them.
So far, the best thing I've seen is sfdisk -l which will show me bootable partitions. In a pinch, I could mount all the bootably parts and scriptify the altering of grub.conf
-Mark