Which of the following commands will help the administrator accomplish this task?

A systems administrator is tasked with installing GRUB on the legacy MBR of the SATA hard drive.

Which of the following commands will help the administrator accomplish this task?
A . grub-install /dev/hda
B . grub-install /dev/sda
C . grub-install /dev/sr0
D . grub-install /dev/hd0,0

View Answer

Answer: B

Explanation:

The command that will help the administrator install GRUB on the legacy MBR of the SATA hard drive is grub-install /dev/sda. This command will install GRUB on the master boot record (MBR) of the first SATA disk (/dev/sda). The MBR is the first sector of a disk that contains boot code and a partition table. GRUB will overwrite the boot code and place its own code that can load GRUB modules and configuration files from a specific partition.

The other options are not correct commands for installing GRUB on the legacy MBR of the SATA hard drive.

The grub-install /dev/hda command will try to install GRUB on the first IDE disk (/dev/hda), which may not exist or may not be bootable. The grub-install /dev/sr0 command will try to install GRUB on the first SCSI CD-ROM device (/dev/sr0), which is not a hard drive and may not be bootable. The grub-install /dev/hd0,0 command is invalid because grub-install does not accept partition names as arguments, only disk names.

References: Installing GRUB using grub-install; GRUB Manual