On Saturday 10 September 2005 02:06, Janne Karhunen wrote:
> On Friday 09 September 2005 19:05, Carl Hartung wrote:
> > If CD1 "completes" and the system resets but then will not boot to the OS
> > *or* from CD1 *or* from CD2, I'd say there are two problems to
> > troubleshoot that may be, or may not be, related.
>
> Where exactly does the booting stop? I had just had a case in which
> SUSE kernel didn't initialize with standard 8259 PIC that it was
> trying to use (ie. noapic setting). Worked fine with apic though
> (ASUS A8N8x, 64bit x86-64).
Hi Janne,
There was a miscommunication. The OP (John) later clarified that after
completing 'phase 1' of the installation (where the system reboots from the
hard drive and the installation continues) the system would *not* boot,
displaying a grub "error 16" message instead.
Had John stopped at that point in the original post, it would have been much
clearer to us what suggestions to make. But he continued, writing that the
system would also not boot from CD1 or CD2... leading to discussions of a
missing i586 glibc, the need to verify md5sums, verify his media, check the
CD drive and/or burner, etc. What he was really trying to say was the boot
process was failing at stage 2.
- Carl
And, John, assuming you'll catch the revival/continuation of this thread:
I agree that there may be a problem with the 10.0 installer, based solely upon
the fact that the 9.2 and 9.3 installers, and others, apparently worked.
However, I really doubt the problem is "serious" and, the truth is, someone
more familiar with Linux and SUSE, SUSE's installation system and the boot
process, itself, might have had that RC1 installation back on track within a
few minutes of seeing the first "error 16."
I realize that you were probably grouchy after running around in circles, and
the situation appears worse for 10.0 given that the other installers worked,
but I don't think it's productive or fair of you to throw this beautiful baby
out with the bath water by judging it too harshly based upon a single hiccup.
To wit: The boot menu you get when booting from CD1 is basically the same as
the menu you get when you boot from the hard drive after the boot loader has
been installed (during 'phase 1'.) The only major difference is that the menu
on CD1 hasn't been tailored to the system... it is generic. Getting back to
your experience, selecting "boot from hard disk" in both cases was telling
grub to load the installed Linux system, but grub wasn't finding it. That
"Error 16" was telling you grub was seeing a different file system structure
than the one it expected and, appropriately, it was refusing to touch it
(instead of potentially trashing data or another OS.) The reason it dropped
you to the grub command line was to give you the opportunity to boot the
installed system manually... assuming you knew the commands and where the
system was located.
In any event, I think the boot loader configuration module was probably
confused by the many partitions and multiple OS's already installed on that
system. Instead of checking the proposed configuration and making
corrections, you just accepted the "autopilot" decisions and proceeded. I've
seen this before, but intervened so that a correct configuration was written.
And for future reference, during installation, there is a rescue-like root
console running on tty2. You access it with the key combination Ctl+Alt+F2.
The only requirement after booting from CD1 is that you proceed beyond the
initial, dumb, boot menu to initiate the installation system, itself.
Otherwise, the installation kernel hasn't been loaded into memory and the
console at tty2 isn't available.
When you're there, issuing "mount" will show you what's mounted and what
isn't. If the target partition isn't mounted, you mount it manually and
navigate to /boot/grub to view the contents of menu.lst ("cat menu.lst").
That will tell you immediately if grub has been pointed to the correct
partition. If not, you edit menu.lst with vi to fix the problem, unmount the
partition, return to the installer (Ctl+Alt+F7) and abort the installation.
That will cleanly reboot the system and your installation will proceed.
Situation conquered using the command line.
If this diagnosis is off target, I'd sure like to know what was found.
regards,
- Carl
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