Note: The Question Dissection Series is designed to present a sample LPIC Exam question taken from various sources for study, providing the right and wrong answers with explanations designed to show you how questions should be read and understood. Additionally there are Notes that point to sites, resources and other tools to help you study properly for the concepts contained in the question.
Question: Configuring GRUB for Booting
From objective 101.2 Boot the System
When using the GRUB boot loader, which of the answers describes the first extended partition on the first hard disk in a GRUB configuration?
❍ A. /dev/hda4
❍ B. /dev/dsk/c0d0s3
❍ C. (hd0,4)
❍ D. c:8000
Answer C is correct because GRUB uses a description of (hdx,y) where x is the disk and y is the partition.
Answer A is incorrect because it describes a device file, not a GRUB object.
Answer B is incorrect because it describes a Solaris Unix device.
Answer D is incorrect because it is the debug location for low-level formatting an MFM/RLL disk.
Notes: Remember that GRUB is different from LILO in that it features a mini-command-line interface that features tab-completion, and instead of referring to the disks and partitions by /dev/hda1 etc., you use (hdx,y) where the disk number is x and the partition is y. A future article will deal with how to install, configure and troubleshoot GRUB.
Several resources can be helpful in learning more about this topic, the first of which would be Chapter 1 of the current version of my LPIC 1 Exam Cram 2 book (look for it in the sidebar ->), starting on Pg 19, the second would be the GRUB man pages ( man grub ).
Any comments, suggestions or questions are welcome.
RossB
Copyright 2000-2009 Ross Brunson
#1 by mmg3 on 2010/09/02 - 12:15
BSD also uses Answer B, fyi.
#2 by RossB on 2010/09/06 - 19:35
gotcha, thanks, in trying to focus on LPIC I did leave out the BSD’s and Solarii.