Re: Unable to boot from HD - or make boot floppy
On Thu, Feb 05, 2004 at 11:51:52AM -0800, Daniel Miller wrote:
> Hullo the group!
>
> I've a got machine that I've been fighting with to make a usable
> router. Debian Woody installed just dandy - but I cannot get it to boot
> using either LILO or GRUB - I get errors going to stage 1.5 from GRUB
> and LILO usually hangs up with L0 L0 L0, etc.
>
> I'm assuming this is a hard drive / bios problem - I've used cfdisk to
> eliminate all partitions, started from scratch, and same mproblem.
>
Yeah - just been through a very similar battle with an Epox motherboard
EP-8RDA and a Samsung 80G and a Maxtor 60G drives.
I won't bore you with all the hassles, but in my case (after hours of
digging), I discovered that the BIOS has a setting for how the hdds
are addressed. I don't pretend to understand all the details, but
the BIOS was defaulting (on an AUTO setting) to CHS, whereas on larger
disks, LBA (or perhaps large?) are appropriate.
I also found that Grub wouldn't start because of the discrepancy
between the BIOSes view of the drives and Grub's own, even when looking
at a boot floppy.
Once I'd set the BIOS to use LBA addressing, I got Grub to boot from
a floppy, and then installed Grub on the Samsung drive. I've not tried
Lilo, but I guess it would probably work as well, as it has LBA support.
And finally, once I'd changed the addressing, (c)fdisk was able to
correctly write *and then read* the partition table from the Samsung
drive, whereas it had always failed on read, beforehand.
I could boot using the debian install disk in rescue mode during all
of this, which was more than a little confusing. The final clue for
me was a kernel message (from dmesg) which said something along the
lines of 'ignoring BIOS chs settings'.
No idea if that'll help. Have fun.
--
Mark Kent
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