Re: Problem booting debian
On Mon, 14 Mar 2011 11:04:54 -0700 (PDT)
Abhishek Sharma <abhi_296@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I have Windows 7 (64 bit) on my primary hard drive. I created an
> image of debian on a CD using .iso file and installed debian on an
> external hard drive. It insatlled successfully without any problem. I
> had created just single partition on whole external hard drive.
>
> When I try to boot the system from the external hard drive(using BIOS
> boot options), system complains "file not found" and goes in rescue
> mode.
>
> I suspect that grub did not get added to master boot record of first
> hard drive. I tried to reinstall grub using the CD in rescue mode,
> but it fails to install.
>
> Bottom line is debian is present there on external hard drive but I
> cannot boot it. Can anybody help me.
>
It's not easy. I've had many times more trouble with grub than I ever
had with lilo, presumably because it's still evolving and lilo was
pretty stable. About all that I can suggest is that you need to be
running a version of grub very similar if not identical to the version
on the hard drive. Obviously, you need to use either grub or grub2,
depending on what is on the drive, but you need to be more precise than
that.
It is probably worth tracking down every boot medium you have and
trying the official grub MBR installation (there are instructions
everywhere) from them. I recently copied my Lenny installation to a new
drive, and it took me half a day to get grub working on it. I failed
completely to install it from the original Lenny. As far as I can
see, that really should have worked, but it is possible that grub
cannot be installed to sda1 and then boot when the drive is promoted to
sda0.
Lenny's grub is not recent, and I think in the end, it was Knoppix 3.9
which worked, or possibly an early Ubuntu Live. I know the versions of
System Rescue and Super Grub that I have failed miserably, and recent
versions of Knoppix have grub2. The Lenny netinstall disc apparently
doesn't have grub available for use from the disc.
I had assorted problems, but mostly grub could see the grub directory
contents on the hard drive, but was unable to read the files, though
the running operating system could. And this wasn't LVM or some exotic
new filesystem, it was ext3 on bare metal. Possibly grub2 is better...
--
Joe
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