[CentOS] Installing CentOS7 boot loader into the /boot partition

Thu Jul 17 16:54:53 UTC 2014
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

On 07/17/2014 09:33 AM, Edward Diener wrote:
> ...
> The grub2 boot loader is installed in a /boot partition in my Fedora 20
> installation and works properly. ...

Fedora is not CentOS; upstream's take would likely be, 'while it may be 
good enough for Fedora, this is an Enterprise Linux, not Fedora, and 
thus we're not going to support anything this sketchy.'  There are 
numerous posts on the Ubuntu forums about it; it's not isolated to CentOS.

> How hard would it really be for grub2 to check to make sure it has
> enough space to install itself into a /boot partition ?

It does do this, and there is an alternate, but not recommended, option 
(which is what the --force does).  The actual error from grub-setup:
grub-setup: warn: Attempting to install GRUB to a partition instead of 
the MBR. This is a BAD idea.
grub-setup: warn: Embedding is not possible. GRUB can only be installed 
in this setup by using blocklists. However, blocklists are UNRELIABLE 
and its use is discouraged.

>
> I finally saw some posts about how to install grub2 for CentOS7 into a
> /boot partition manually and I will do that. But the Anaconda installer
> should never have created this headache to begin with no matter what
> they say.

Anaconda didn't create the headache; the developers of GRUB2 did by not 
properly supporting installation to a partition without saying that it 
is a BAD idea.

> All other Linux distros I have used, such as Suse, Mint,
> Ubuntu, Mageia etc., give the ability of installing the bootloader into
> a /boot partition even when defaulting to grub2. There is no excuse for
> this Anaconda nonsense from Fedora other than programmer egotism.
>
It's a GRUB2 problem, not an anaconda one, and GRUB2 is a GNU project, 
not a Fedora one.

If I were in release engineering for upstream, I wouldn't allow anaconda 
to do something that the GRUB2 authors say is a BAD idea; there will be 
at least one person who will lose data or have an unbootable system by 
using the feature (the GNU GRUB programmers put the warning message in; 
talk to them about why they did that and what the GNU GRUB2 project 
plans to do about properly supporting installation in an 
enterprise-worthy fashion to a partition and not to the MBR).

And I want to be able to do the bootloader install to a partition 
myself, but I do understand why it would be supported for the 
non-Enterprise Fedora but not for the Enterprise version.