Bug#286153: installation-reports: GRUB hang with infinite beep after Reboot
Subject: installation-reports: GRUB hang with infinite beep after Reboot
Followup-For: Bug #283950
Package: installation-reports
Version: sarge_d-i/i386/rc2
*** Please type your report below this line ***
GRUB hung at first boot after install, showing "GRUB _" on the screen
at lower left corner (here the '_' means the blinking cursor in column 6)
and beeping a continuous tone (infinitely many '^G' with no sound gap).
I downloaded the 2004-12-16 edition of
http://cdimage.debian.org/pub/cdimage-testing/sarge_d-i/i386/rc2/sarge-i386-netinst.iso
to install sarge onto an existing multiboot box, with sarge root in
newly-formatted 6GB ext3 hda7, with a separate /boot partition in
existing 150MB ext3 hda1 [with GRUB existing in MBR], and an existing
1GB swap on hda6. I used manual partitioning to select the correct
filesystems. I chose to have the installer put GRUB on hda7 because
I feared that my existing hda(0,0)/grub/grub.conf [with GRUB in MBR]
would be wiped out.
After apparently successful install, reboot brought up the Debian GRUB
boot screen, now with twice as many choices as before the install:
each old multibooting kernel now also had a "(recovery mode)" choice that
merely appended " single" to the kernel command line. Choosing the
default Debian 1st line [sarge in normal mode] hung as described above.
The kernel commandline parameters from my old grub.conf were not forwarded
to the new /boot/grub/menu.lst.
I used rescue mode of Fedora Core 3 DVD to re-install GRUB on MBR,
then rebooted the installer and tried installing Debian sarge again.
This time I did not tell the installer about /boot on hda1,
but still asked for GRUB in hda7. Both Install and reboot succeeded,
using the Debian GRUB in hda7. I think that the Debian GRUB splash
screen is ugly, and I don't want the "(recovery mode)" choices for
all my other multibooted systems [I know how to use the GRUB editor
to boot into single-user mode on demand], so I put GRUB back in MBR
and forwarded the vmlinuz and initrd files by hand from Debian /boot
directory to my hda1 /boot partition. Final result: succesful
installation on second try, taking advantage of expert user knowledge
to bypass failure of installer to setup GRUB correctly in an
uncommon situation.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.4.27-1-386
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
--
John Reiser, jreiser@BitWagon.com
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