Re: Problem Booting After Install
On Fri, 30 May 2003 12:47:35 -0400
"Scott MacMaster" <me@scottmacmaster.com> wrote:
> Hmm, makes me wonder why they use lilo in the installation program for
> Debian.
I wonder that as well.
> The first step, fdformat /dev/fd0, worked ok. However, the next step
> didn't, mjfs -t msdos /dev/fd0. I got the error message, mkfs.msdos: No
> such file or directory. It then occurred to me that I already have a
That's because your kernel doesn't have support for the MS-DOS file system.
"mkfs -t vfat /dev/fd0" works though, and that's the kind of DOS floppies
we're likely to have laying around anyway.
> These all worked fine. I then rebooted. The grub boot loader came up and
> displayed a prompt and did nothing else. I typed help read through info
> about a number of options and commands and tried a few. For everything it
> typed I got vague error messages about the command not being correct or
> invalid or something like that. What do I from here?
Well, I don't know another way to say this: read the article and follow
along, trying what it says. You do need to adapt the instructions in the
article to your own partition/OS setup.
For example if the article says do "root (hd0,1)" but your Debian partition
is /dev/hda1, you need to do "root (hd0,0) instead. Where the article says,
"kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda2 ro vga=791" but your kernel is
/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-bf2.4 and you don't have framebuffer support, you need
to modify the command accordingly.
> Once I get this figured out and working I assume I can setup the hard
> drive the same way by using these commands. right?
> grub
> grub> root (hdb)
> grub> setup (hdb)
> grub> quit
Nope. If you want to use grub to boot your machine it needs to be installed
in the MBR of hda. Note that Debian provides a utility to help with this,
see "grub-install".
Even after grub is installed, you won't get more than a command prompt until
you provide a boot menu info file. Debian provides a utility for this, too:
"update-grub".
Kevin
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