MBR problems
Hello all, I work for a very tiny charity. I was given 2 Dell Dimension 1100 computers with Debian installed originally, used as test machines. Their hard drives were wiped on purpose by an external company (long story, that I'm not too fully aware of) and I was told to try and recover the (luckily not too critical) data. Taking the first computer, when starting it up, it showed a GRUB error message. I booted up Knoppix, downloaded TestDisk, recovered the partitions, restored from superblock backup and ran fsck. It repaired all errors, and put all recovered folders in lost+found. I moved all folders back to where they were and renamed them. I then rebooted and first machine worked perfect. Taking the second machine, on boot up, it showed five random characters (always the same one every time though) and stopped there. Did the same procedure with the first machine, used Knoppix, recovered the partitions, restored from superblock, used fsck, and moved all folders to where they were. I rebooted, but got the same 5 random characters. I figured they wiped the MBR in the second machine, while they didn't with the first one. Don't know why. Anyway, rebooted into Knoppix, ran GRUB and then used the following commands as root: root (hd0,0) setup (hd0) quit It installed everything OK, and everything passed, with no error messages. Seemed to work OK. I rebooted, and this time, I can see random characters flash rapidly upwards on the screen and then it stops with a line on the bottom, with PCMP and then 4 gibberish characters (of which one is a smiley face) and then DELL Dell DE051 and nothing else. I've tried reinstalling GRUB a few times to no avail. I suspect the MBR is a bit flakey, and needs wiping, but everything that I could find about wiping the MBR also claims will wipe the partitions which makes me a little nervous. How do I fix GRUB so I can boot Debian again? I can access and mount the hard drive via Knoppix fine and can read all data on there. BTW when the BIOS splash screen shows, I get a Dell DE051 series above the loading bar which sort of explains the Dell DE051 part when the BIOS tries to find a bootloader. Any ideas how I can fix the MBR without having to buy a second hard drive and move all data off, and wipe the first one? Thanks very much for your help in advance - very much appreciated! Regards - Piers -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: MBR problems
On Tue, 2007-05-15 at 21:53 +0100, Piers Kittel wrote: Hello all, I work for a very tiny charity. I was given 2 Dell Dimension 1100 computers with Debian installed originally, used as test machines. Their hard drives were wiped on purpose by an external company (long story, that I'm not too fully aware of) and I was told to try and recover the (luckily not too critical) data. Taking the first computer, when starting it up, it showed a GRUB error message. I booted up Knoppix, downloaded TestDisk, recovered the partitions, restored from superblock backup and ran fsck. It repaired all errors, and put all recovered folders in lost+found. I moved all folders back to where they were and renamed them. I then rebooted and first machine worked perfect. Taking the second machine, on boot up, it showed five random characters (always the same one every time though) and stopped there. Did the same procedure with the first machine, used Knoppix, recovered the partitions, restored from superblock, used fsck, and moved all folders to where they were. I rebooted, but got the same 5 random characters. I figured they wiped the MBR in the second machine, while they didn't with the first one. Don't know why. Anyway, rebooted into Knoppix, ran GRUB and then used the following commands as root: root (hd0,0) setup (hd0) quit It installed everything OK, and everything passed, with no error messages. Seemed to work OK. I rebooted, and this time, I can see random characters flash rapidly upwards on the screen and then it stops with a line on the bottom, with PCMP and then 4 gibberish characters (of which one is a smiley face) and then DELL Dell DE051 and nothing else. I've tried reinstalling GRUB a few times to no avail. I suspect the MBR is a bit flakey, and needs wiping, but everything that I could find about wiping the MBR also claims will wipe the partitions which makes me a little nervous. Wiping the MBR only removes the partition table, not the partitions themselves. In other words, you can wipe out the partition information, then recreate the partitions exactly as they were, and all your data will still be there. How do I fix GRUB so I can boot Debian again? I can access and mount the hard drive via Knoppix fine and can read all data on there. BTW when the BIOS splash screen shows, I get a Dell DE051 series above the loading bar which sort of explains the Dell DE051 part when the BIOS tries to find a bootloader. Any ideas how I can fix the MBR without having to buy a second hard drive and move all data off, and wipe the first one? from knoppix, do: # take note of all the partition info cfdisk /dev/hda # wipe MBR dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda count=512 # recreate your partitions exactly as they were cfdisk /dev/hda However, you might also want to use a disk utility of some sort (badblocks, Seagate's Seatools, or whatever) to verify that the hard drive isn't bad. -davidc -- gpg-key: http://www.zettazebra.com/files/key.gpg signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
RE: Infinite sevens: MBR problems
Thanks for the advice. I put linear in and rebooted with no
change. Then of course I remembered to run lilo. (Haven't had my coffee yet.)
When I run LILO, I get the following errors.
debian:~# lilo
hda: drive_cmd: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: drive_cmd: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
hda: read_intr: status=0x59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error }
hda: read_intr: status=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
hda: status error: status=0x50 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest }
hda: drive not ready for command
Warning: /dev/hdc1 is not on the first disk
Added Linux *
Skipping /vmlinuz.old
debian:~#
I get the impression from this that lilo is trying to do something with the
first drive, which on the PC110 is a 4MB internal flashram drive. Here is
my current lilo.conf, sans comments.
linear
boot=/dev/hdc1
root=/dev/hdc1
install=/boot/boot.b
map=/boot/map
delay=50
vga=normal
default=Linux
image=/vmlinuz
label=Linux
read-only
image=/vmlinuz.old
label=LinuxOLD
read-only
optional
It appeared that despite the errors, it was installing on hdc, so
I went ahead and rebooted. I still getting LI and then it hangs. :-(
Thanks for the help. I feel like I'm close.
Peter
At 12:53 PM 2/7/01 -0500, you wrote:
My documentation indicates that if you see LI at the prompt and then the
process hangs, the second stage boot loader was loaded properly but can't be
executed.
Try adding the word linear to the global portion of the /etc/lilo.conf
file.
Re-run LILO -- /sbin/lilo
Then reboot
This is interesting, let us know what works
John
-Original Message-
From: brian moore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2001 12:38 PM
To: Debian-User@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: Infinite sevens: MBR problems
On Wed, Feb 07, 2001 at 12:18:59PM -0500, Peter Howell wrote:
On a side note, I went into the bios and altered the boot
order. Now when I boot, it just prints:
LI
and then stops. From what I've been able to find, this has to do
with problems in the mapping of the drive. I edited /etc/lilo.conf and
commented out the LBA switch, since this is only a 260MB drive. I then
ran lilo and rebooted. Unfortunately, that didn't fix it.
Whenever I run lilo I get the warning that hdc is not the first
drive. Could this be my problem? The BIOS allows me to boot off it
in DOS.
Yes. That very well could be the problem.
LILO complains about the same thing for me on one of my home machines
(which has a nice fast SCSI for 'real' stuff and huge IDE drives for
mp3's and other piggy stuff where size matters more than speed... :)).
The way SCSI inserts itself into the boot chain annoys LILO (and hurts
my head anyway... it's REALLY bizarre trying to convince the bios to
boot a bootable CD on a scsi drive...)
What happens on my home system if I ignore the warnings is that the BIOS
will gladly load the LILO mbr off the hard drive, but when that mbr
tries to read the kernel, it ends up looking at the IDE drive... which
doesn't have it.
Anyway, there are some little-used options in LILO to get around this
and to convince the BIOS what to do. Look specifically at the 'disk='
section of the lilo.conf man page. You'll probably need to convince
LILO of the actual ordering of devices by the BIOS.
--
CueCat decoder .signature by Larry Wall:
#!/usr/bin/perl -n
printf Serial: %s Type: %s Code: %s\n, map { tr/a-zA-Z0-9+-/ -_/; $_ =
unpack
'u', chr(32 + length()*3/4) . $_; s/\0+$//; $_ ^= C x length; }
/\.([^.]+)/g;
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Re: Infinite sevens: MBR problems
At 03:09 PM 2/6/01 -0800, Joey Hess wrote: Peter Howell wrote: MBR L 07 07 07 07 07 . From lilo's manual: Disk error codes - - - - - - - - If the BIOS signals an error when LILO is trying to load a boot image, the respective error code is displayed. The following BIOS error codes are known: ... 0x07 Invalid initialization. The BIOS failed to properly initialize the disk controller. You should control the BIOS setup parameters. A warm boot might help too. Now I'm a little confused. I ruled out BIOS problems because MBR was coming up. Presumably, the system is finding the drive and running the MBR program on the MBR. Is MBR synonymous with the part of LILO put in the MBR? Could the BIOS successfully find the MBR, but then fail to find the drive on subsiquent redirection? On a side note, I went into the bios and altered the boot order. Now when I boot, it just prints: LI and then stops. From what I've been able to find, this has to do with problems in the mapping of the drive. I edited /etc/lilo.conf and commented out the LBA switch, since this is only a 260MB drive. I then ran lilo and rebooted. Unfortunately, that didn't fix it. Whenever I run lilo I get the warning that hdc is not the first drive. Could this be my problem? The BIOS allows me to boot off it in DOS. Peter
Re: Infinite sevens: MBR problems
On Wed, Feb 07, 2001 at 12:18:59PM -0500, Peter Howell wrote:
On a side note, I went into the bios and altered the boot
order. Now when I boot, it just prints:
LI
and then stops. From what I've been able to find, this has to do
with problems in the mapping of the drive. I edited /etc/lilo.conf and
commented out the LBA switch, since this is only a 260MB drive. I then
ran lilo and rebooted. Unfortunately, that didn't fix it.
Whenever I run lilo I get the warning that hdc is not the first
drive. Could this be my problem? The BIOS allows me to boot off it
in DOS.
Yes. That very well could be the problem.
LILO complains about the same thing for me on one of my home machines
(which has a nice fast SCSI for 'real' stuff and huge IDE drives for
mp3's and other piggy stuff where size matters more than speed... :)).
The way SCSI inserts itself into the boot chain annoys LILO (and hurts
my head anyway... it's REALLY bizarre trying to convince the bios to
boot a bootable CD on a scsi drive...)
What happens on my home system if I ignore the warnings is that the BIOS
will gladly load the LILO mbr off the hard drive, but when that mbr
tries to read the kernel, it ends up looking at the IDE drive... which
doesn't have it.
Anyway, there are some little-used options in LILO to get around this
and to convince the BIOS what to do. Look specifically at the 'disk='
section of the lilo.conf man page. You'll probably need to convince
LILO of the actual ordering of devices by the BIOS.
--
CueCat decoder .signature by Larry Wall:
#!/usr/bin/perl -n
printf Serial: %s Type: %s Code: %s\n, map { tr/a-zA-Z0-9+-/ -_/; $_ = unpack
'u', chr(32 + length()*3/4) . $_; s/\0+$//; $_ ^= C x length; } /\.([^.]+)/g;
RE: Infinite sevens: MBR problems
My documentation indicates that if you see LI at the prompt and then the
process hangs, the second stage boot loader was loaded properly but can't be
executed.
Try adding the word linear to the global portion of the /etc/lilo.conf
file.
Re-run LILO -- /sbin/lilo
Then reboot
This is interesting, let us know what works
John
-Original Message-
From: brian moore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2001 12:38 PM
To: Debian-User@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: Infinite sevens: MBR problems
On Wed, Feb 07, 2001 at 12:18:59PM -0500, Peter Howell wrote:
On a side note, I went into the bios and altered the boot
order. Now when I boot, it just prints:
LI
and then stops. From what I've been able to find, this has to do
with problems in the mapping of the drive. I edited /etc/lilo.conf and
commented out the LBA switch, since this is only a 260MB drive. I then
ran lilo and rebooted. Unfortunately, that didn't fix it.
Whenever I run lilo I get the warning that hdc is not the first
drive. Could this be my problem? The BIOS allows me to boot off it
in DOS.
Yes. That very well could be the problem.
LILO complains about the same thing for me on one of my home machines
(which has a nice fast SCSI for 'real' stuff and huge IDE drives for
mp3's and other piggy stuff where size matters more than speed... :)).
The way SCSI inserts itself into the boot chain annoys LILO (and hurts
my head anyway... it's REALLY bizarre trying to convince the bios to
boot a bootable CD on a scsi drive...)
What happens on my home system if I ignore the warnings is that the BIOS
will gladly load the LILO mbr off the hard drive, but when that mbr
tries to read the kernel, it ends up looking at the IDE drive... which
doesn't have it.
Anyway, there are some little-used options in LILO to get around this
and to convince the BIOS what to do. Look specifically at the 'disk='
section of the lilo.conf man page. You'll probably need to convince
LILO of the actual ordering of devices by the BIOS.
--
CueCat decoder .signature by Larry Wall:
#!/usr/bin/perl -n
printf Serial: %s Type: %s Code: %s\n, map { tr/a-zA-Z0-9+-/ -_/; $_ =
unpack
'u', chr(32 + length()*3/4) . $_; s/\0+$//; $_ ^= C x length; }
/\.([^.]+)/g;
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Infinite sevens: MBR problems
I've almost successfully installed the debian base on a pcmcia hard drive in a PC110. I say almost because I can't get it to boot. When I attempt to boot off the HD, I get the following message. MBR L 07 07 07 07 07 . and so on forever. If I hold down space during boot, I get the MBR 1FA prompt, so presumably MBR is loading just fine. If I attempt a '1' from there, I get the above output. Booting off the floppy works fine. AS a side note, if I move the drive to a different machine (Ricoh g1200s) the message is the same but I get infinite 4's. Does anyone know what's going on here? Could my kernal have been hosed? Thanks Peter
Re: Infinite sevens: MBR problems
Peter Howell wrote: MBR L 07 07 07 07 07 . From lilo's manual: Disk error codes - - - - - - - - If the BIOS signals an error when LILO is trying to load a boot image, the respective error code is displayed. The following BIOS error codes are known: ... 0x07 Invalid initialization. The BIOS failed to properly initialize the disk controller. You should control the BIOS setup parameters. A warm boot might help too. -- see shy jo
?? Lilo, Win NT, MBR problems: a catch 22
At home I have a laptop where win98 and linux co-exist, with lilo offering to boot either one at startup. But at office, after linux installs lilo to MBR, NT won't boot. So, I went to boot floppy, ran fdisk /mbr; but now machine won't boot linux. Boot floppy won't work for linux either. Reinstalled NT from scratch,and it is now the default boot. Since can't boot linux from floppy, I am now reinstalling Potato. But, I get stuck at ? where to put lilo. The /boot thing doesn't work for me. I can boot with shift key down, but then computer hangs and won't accept a number like 2. Shouldn't complain, I guess, but I lost a lot of time today because of this problem. Newbie always appreciates help. TIA,,,dave
Re: ?? Lilo, Win NT, MBR problems: a catch 22
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At home I have a laptop where win98 and linux co-exist, with lilo offering to boot either one at startup. But at office, after linux installs lilo to MBR, NT won't boot. So, I went to boot floppy, ran fdisk /mbr; but now machine won't boot linux. Boot floppy won't work for linux either. Reinstalled NT from scratch,and it is now the default boot. Since can't boot linux from floppy, I am now reinstalling Potato. But, I get stuck at ? where to put lilo. The /boot thing doesn't work for me. I can boot with shift key down, but then computer hangs and won't accept a number like 2. Shouldn't complain, I guess, but I lost a lot of time today because of this problem. Newbie always appreciates help. TIA,,,dave - I use System Commander 2000 a commercial boot loader that will allow you to do what you want. it is cheap and works flawlessly. It did not work with Win2000 the last time I checked but that may be fixed now. Happy Holidays! John
Re: ?? Lilo, Win NT, MBR problems: a catch 22
Pending further investigation, we now allege that [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At home I have a laptop where win98 and linux co-exist, with lilo offering to boot either one at startup. But at office, after linux installs lilo to MBR, NT won't boot. So, I went to boot floppy, ran fdisk /mbr; but now machine won't boot linux. Boot floppy won't work for linux either. Reinstalled NT from scratch,and it is now the default boot. Since can't boot linux from floppy, I am now reinstalling Potato. But, I get stuck at ? where to put lilo. The /boot thing doesn't work for me. I can boot with shift key down, but then computer hangs and won't accept a number like 2. Shouldn't complain, I guess, but I lost a lot of time today because of this problem. Newbie always appreciates help. TIA,,,dave NT can boot from lilo, just set it up exactly as you would win98. You can also boot linux from ntloader; there's a howto that explains how to do this.
Re: ?? Lilo, Win NT, MBR problems: a catch 22
On Tue, Dec 26, 2000 at 06:25:28PM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At home I have a laptop where win98 and linux co-exist, with lilo offering to boot either one at startup. But at office, after linux installs lilo to MBR, NT won't boot. So, I went to boot floppy, ran fdisk /mbr; but now machine won't boot linux. Boot floppy won't work for linux either. Reinstalled NT from scratch,and it is now the default boot. Since can't boot linux from floppy, I am now reinstalling Potato. But, I get stuck at ? where to put lilo. The /boot thing doesn't work for me. I can boot with shift key down, but then computer hangs and won't accept a number like 2. Shouldn't complain, I guess, but I lost a lot of time today because of this problem. Newbie always appreciates help. TIA,,,dave See the Linux+NT-Loader mini-HOWTO (included in the doc-linux-txt package).
Re: ?? Lilo, Win NT, MBR problems: a catch 22
i did this recently, and as a solution i just created a 15MB C: drive for the boot loader(primary partition) then Linux got a /boot partition and NT got it's own primary partition. then i load LILO to the MBR and tell it to boot to C: (which then loads NT's boot loader) to load NT or load linux off it's own partition for linux. ive worked with other ways to do this including copying the boot sectors to a file for nt's boot.ini but i didn't like how that worked. in my experience the above was a better solution. (or just put NT on a FAT partition ..depending on your needs and the size of the HDD ..) nate [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At home I have a laptop where win98 and linux co-exist, with lilo offering to boot either one at startup. But at office, after linux installs lilo to MBR, NT won't boot. So, I went to boot floppy, ran fdisk /mbr; but now machine won't boot linux. Boot floppy won't work for linux either. Reinstalled NT from scratch,and it is now the default boot. Since can't boot linux from floppy, I am now reinstalling Potato. But, I get stuck at ? where to put lilo. The /boot thing doesn't work for me. I can boot with shift key down, but then computer hangs and won't accept a number like 2. Shouldn't complain, I guess, but I lost a lot of time today because of this problem. Newbie always appreciates help. TIA,,,dave -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- ::: ICQ: 75132336 http://www.aphroland.org/ http://www.linuxpowered.net/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
