Re: MBR Confusion SOLVED
> > 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."
This is fixed. Thanks to everyone for their help.
To fix this I booted a RIPLinuX recovery system with the external drive
attached, and got a grub command prompt from there. I did "find
/vmlinuz" and deduced that hd2 was my external drive as far as grub was
concerned. I then typed:
root (hd2,0)
setup (hd2)
These commands apparently installed the proper MBR on on the external
drive. I then put that drive into its target host (Pentium III box),
and it booted properly. I had two kernels on that disk, the k7 kernel
that the etch installer had put there, and the i686 kernel that I had
manually added using 'dselect'. So, I just had to get rid of the k7
kernel, and now I have a happy PIII machine, using a hard drive that was
built on an AMD system. This was my goal with all of this nonsense, but
I'm thinking there must be a better way. My PIII machine seems to have
floppy as the only boot option besides hard drive, and I really wanted
to avoid stacks of floppies.
To fix my AMD grub to boot without the external drive attached I:
root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)
and all was well.
I'm still a bit sketchy on everything that happened here, but I suppose
that what the grub manual is for.
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