Re: GRUB problem

[cr <cr@orcon.net.nz>]

On Thursday 03 July 2003 05:51, Vineet Kumar wrote:
> * cr (cr@orcon.net.nz) [030629 19:28]:
> > Yes, I did that.  It produced a floppy which, when booted off, just says
> > 'GRUB' and hangs.
>
> Does it hang, or is that a grub prompt you're seeing?  It won't go to a
> menu.  You'll have to type commands manually.  From the looks of this
> thread, it seems like you're getting familiar enough with grub to be
> able to do that by now =)

This is the boot floppy produced by using grub-install to fd0.   (I can't 
remember the exact sequence of commands now).
It says 'GRUB' (in capital letters) and hangs.   Typing has no effect.
(But see below for a 'good' boot floppy - )

> Basically you need to type just what you would in a stanza of menu.lst
> right into the grub prompt, something like this:
>
> root (hd0,0)
> kernel /vmlinuz-2.2.20-idepci ro root=/dev/hda5
> initrd /initrd.img-2.2.20-idepci
> boot
>
> good times,
> Vineet

I do have another Grub floppy, produced IIRC by following 'Creating a Grub 
Boot Floppy' from the Grub manual, using dd to copy stage1 and stage2 to a 
floppy.    That one boots into Grub successfully.  


I booted off the 'good' Grub floppy, and got the following:

grub >  root (hd0,0)
    Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
grub >  kernel /vmlinuz-2.2.20-idepci ro root=/dev/hda5
    Error 13    Invalid or unsupported executable format

And -  I'm too stupid to own a computer!!!
I just fixed the whole thing.  "The answer, when found, will be obvious".

This is where something that had been niggling at me for days finally dawned 
on me.    Not expecting it to make any difference, I went to the BIOS and 
changed the drive setting from 'Normal' (16/63/4092, which is what the drive 
label says) to 'LBA'  64/63/1023.      I bever bothered before because I 
think Linux takes no notice of BIOS settings and I imagined Grub didn't 
either, besides which  the  root (hd0,0) command had always shown the 
filesystem correctly.

Anyway, I got 

grub >  root (hd0,0)
    Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83    (exactly the same as 
before)
grub >  kernel /vmlinuz-2.2.20-idepci ro root=/dev/hda5
    [Linux-bzimage, setup=0x1000, size=0x15a5]

... and it boots!

And it *also* now boots fine off the hard drive.   Problem solved!

I feel like an idiot, missing something so obvious!   

Thanks, everyone who helped with advice.   My apologies for taking up so much 
of your time.   

Regards

Chris