Re: MBR Confusion? (was: Building i386 Disk on AMD64 -- chroot Fails: Exec format error)
On Sat, Apr 07, 2007 at 01:30:57 +0200, Matt Miller wrote:
> > I've attached an external hard drive to my etch AMD64 box, booted my
> > AMD64 box into the debian installer, and installed a fresh i386 etch
> > onto the external drive.
>
> Now I can't boot my box without the external drive attached, because
> grub complains with "error 21." I'm thinking that when the debian
> installer made the external drive bootable with my new i386 etch some
> stuff happened with the master boot record or something. Also, when I
> put the external drive into my Pentium III box, nothing happens.
> Apparently the right MBR stiff is not on there.
>
> Anyway, I'm in a bit deep at this point. Hopefully there is some simple
> way to prepare the external drive on my AMD64 box to be the internal,
> bootable drive of my Pentium III, and to tell grub on my AMD64 box that
> it doesn't need the external drive attached in order to boot.
>
> Go ahead and laugh. Just give me some good advice when you're done.
It looks like the MBR of your Etch installation was rewritten so that
grub now looks for /boot on the external drive.
The Etch installer disk has a rescue mode which should allow you to make
your normal installation bootable again. I think you just have to type
"rescue" at the boot prompt and off you go. It will try to find your
root partition and reconstruct the MBR and grub accordingly. I never had
to use this myself therefore I am shaky on the details. Try the F1 - F7
online help of the installation disk.
Also, see here:
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/325
(If the other system cannot boot from USB directly then you might have
to make a grub boot disk for it.)
--
Regards,
Florian
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