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Re: debian-sarge grub install

Can you grub again and use find to confirm it can see files in your root directory? like so... 

grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
 (hd0,1)
grub> quit
also run fdisk and see which partition is marked active. Then we can better tell what the problem is. Its possible that grub is installed in your MBR but another partition is active (marked for booting). 

Patrick

Takis Diakoumis wrote:
Hi i'm having quite the problem with grub and booting into my system. 
i am installing debian-sarge (27032004 release) and can't seem to get
beyond the first reboot. 
when i do reboot all i get is GRUB GRUB GRUB... all over the screen
repeating infinitely so it appears to be a problem with the boot loader and
its installation in the MBR (?).
the HD setup is as follows: hda - 120GB drive (/) hdb - 20GB drive (/backup) hdc - 80GB drive (/home) 
i have tried different combinations including separate /boot partitions -
all to no avail. grub is installed on hda. 
previously i had redhat9, mandrake9.2 and suse9 on this machine
(individually - not mutli-boot). all of these worked fine (i've been
weaning myself onto debian). only now when i installed debian is it causing
problems. 
i also installed the same debian distro on another machine and didn't have
problems - so it must be the combination of this machine and debian-sarge. i have checked the bios and it is booting into the correct drive. 
i remembered a suse install bootdisk i created had a boot from hd option so
i used this selecting boot from hd and only then did i get the grub menu
-sequence was: boot disk -> select boot from hd -> grub menu. ok, so now at a command prompt. i reinstalled grub on the mbr using: grub> root (hd0,0) grub> setup (hd0) 
the above said it was successful. but it still didn't boot and came up with
the same GRUB all over the screen. i then cleared the MBR completely scrubbing it with zeros and then reinstalling grub on the machine and the MBR. still no go. 
i searched the web for similar issues and found a few. most seemed to be
related to bios LBA settings. the bios was set to autodetect the drives and
always defaulted to LBA anyway. i did force LBA on it through the bios  -
this didn't help either.

i also tried installing grub with setup --force-lba (hd0) but this too
didn't work.

i'm stumped!! it worked fine for other distros - now its stuffed and all i
get is GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB all over my screen over and over. 
i have checked /boot/grub contents and all images/files are there and look
ok. 
if anyone has any ideas i would really appreciate it. i'm getting desparate
here. i'm determined to have a debian box up and running!!
any suggestions at all.... thanks heaps... 
Takis
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