Re: "Grub Hard Disk Error", after installing from sarge floppies
* Joao Clemente <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2004 Nov 30 20:09 -0600]: > >grub is "unreasonably" finicky > > What means "finicky"? 1rst time I see this word Probably the best way to explain it is to say that it is very particular about everything being setup the way it likes it and if not then it fails. In USA English finicky refers to a person that is very choosy, careful, or not easily satisfied. - Nate >> -- Wireless | Amateur Radio Station N0NB | Successfully Microsoft Amateur radio exams; ham radio; Linux info @ | free since January 1998. http://www.qsl.net/n0nb/ | "Debian, the choice of My Kawasaki KZ-650 SR @| a GNU generation!" http://www.networksplus.net/n0nb/ | http://www.debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: "Grub Hard Disk Error", after installing from sarge floppies
Joao Clemente wrote: [snip] 3) install into the boot sector of the partition (/dev/hda1 ) instead MBR of the disk ( /dev/hda ) - but the mbr must be empty too I am not certain of you're refering to grub, lilo, or both. I see no reason why grub (or lilo) would fail when installed in MBR but suceed when installed in /dev/hda1... and, btw, can grub be placed in /dev/hda1? I've done this with lilo, but never seen it done with grub... [...] Ok, it is possible to install grub in /dev/hda1 and in fact the installer allow us to say where we want to place it if we say NO to "install grub in MBR?" My problem is solved! I have no ideia why, but installing grub in /dev/hda1 allowed me to boot the machine without a problem! Thanks to all that replied! Joao Clemente -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: "Grub Hard Disk Error", after installing from sarge floppies
Hi Alvin. Once again, thanks for your ultra-fast reply. I have not been able to understand completly what you've said so I'll comment along your mail, ok? Alvin Oga wrote: On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, Joao Clemente wrote: ...but when one is suposed to get the GRUB menu, I get simply a "GRUB Hard Disk Error" message grub is "unreasonably" finicky What means "finicky"? 1rst time I see this word you have several choices.. 1) boot into dos a:> fdisk /mbr -- wipe it out and try grub-install again I could try this but it would fail again... as you already said - and its obvious that it will... 2) i always use lilo, whenver grub failed .. Well, I was willing to try it... but I haven't been able to get to a point that I get a shell... 3) install into the boot sector of the partition (/dev/hda1 ) instead MBR of the disk ( /dev/hda ) - but the mbr must be empty too I am not certain of you're refering to grub, lilo, or both. I see no reason why grub (or lilo) would fail when installed in MBR but suceed when installed in /dev/hda1... and, btw, can grub be placed in /dev/hda1? I've done this with lilo, but never seen it done with grub... presumably you can boot off of other media to try to install the MBR with grub/lilo/loadlin/... boot media == boot floppies, knoppix, deb cdrom, where you can get into standalone rescue mode Well here is also one of the problems I tried to follow instructions on http://www.desktop-linux.net/grub.htm about using a grub floppy and I was not sucessfull... I found out that I needed (at least) to give the commands - root (hda0,0) - kernel /vmlinuz - initrd /initrd.img - boot but I must be missing something as even with this the boot fails at some point with a kernel panic... One thing that its crossing my mind is... can I use tomsrtbt floppy and chroot to my freshly installed sarge? Can I run "apt-get lilo" from such a chroot'ed environment? Is it worth a try? (I am not trying this at this moment because I decided to reinstall again, to see if I can have a choice somewhere of getting lilo instead of grub somewhere during installation) Thanks Joao Clemente Ps: I can only use floppies as boot media for this machine.. no boot from cdrom available... it's an old bad machine.. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: "Grub Hard Disk Error", after installing from sarge floppies
On these old machines it was often necessary to use a scheme called Logical Block Addressing (LBA) to allow MS-DOS access to the entire drive. Many later 486 machines incorporated LBA into the BIOS and once activated is rather seemless. If the BIOS did not support LBA the drive manufacturer often included a utility that would install some code on the drive to add LBA as sort of a BIOS extension. These were often problematic. I've never played with GRUB on a machine using LBA, but had good luck with LILO. On this old of a machine, it is one area I would look at as I don't know if GRUB reads the drive geometry itself or if it uses what the BIOS tells it. It almost seems like as though the install took place through LBA mapping and now GRUB is trying to read the drive through its real geometry which more than likely won't work. - Nate >> -- Wireless | Amateur Radio Station N0NB | Successfully Microsoft Amateur radio exams; ham radio; Linux info @ | free since January 1998. http://www.qsl.net/n0nb/ | "Debian, the choice of My Kawasaki KZ-650 SR @| a GNU generation!" http://www.networksplus.net/n0nb/ | http://www.debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: "Grub Hard Disk Error", after installing from sarge floppies
On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, Joao Clemente wrote: > ...but when one is suposed to get the GRUB menu, I get simply a > "GRUB Hard Disk Error" message grub is "unreasonably" finicky you have several choices.. 1) boot into dos a:> fdisk /mbr -- wipe it out and try grub-install again -- another way to wipe out the bad MBR dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1 conv=sync ( the bs and count values are important == no typo allowed ) 2) i always use lilo, whenver grub failed .. 3) install into the boot sector of the partition (/dev/hda1 ) instead MBR of the disk ( /dev/hda ) - but the mbr must be empty too presumably you can boot off of other media to try to install the MBR with grub/lilo/loadlin/... boot media == boot floppies, knoppix, deb cdrom, where you can get into standalone rescue mode reinstalling probably wont help until the cause of the grub problem is solved c ya alvin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]