Re: new Etch install fails to boot
On Mon, Jul 30, 2007 at 08:24:08AM -0400, Steve Kleene wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 29, 2007 at 11:00:30PM -0400, Steve Kleene wrote:
> > [I wrote that my fresh Etch install calls grub and then stops.]
>
> On Sun, 29 Jul 2007 23:19:40 -0400, From: Douglas Allan Tutty replied:
> > What happens if you reboot the installer in rescue mode and tell it to
> > install grub again?
>
> I don't know how to do this yet, but it sounds like it's worth looking into.
> I'm hoping not to have to run the whole build again.
>
The installer's rescue mode (at the boot prompt, instead of typing
'install', just type 'rescue') is designed to rescue an already
installed system. It will not reinstall from rescue mode. I also gives
you the option of a shell chrooted into your installation where you can
run commands as if it had booted normally.
> > Does the box have a floppy and do you have a grub-disk (I've never made
> > a grub-stick)? Will that get you to a grub command line?
>
> It does have a floppy. I do not have a grub-disk. I do have a second
> (newer) box that is happily running Etch.
>
Then on that box, install the grub-disk package. It gives you a disk
image which you write to a floppy with dd:
dd if=grub-disk.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024 conv=sync; sync
If that box has grub installed and you have the grub-doc package, there
are instructions for putting grub onto a floppy from within the grub
command line.
> And on Sun, 29 Jul 2007 22:28:04 -0500, "Mumia W.." wrote:
>
> > If you can, try to get the boot files placed before the 1024th cylinder
> > boundary. Sometimes this is at 0.5GB, 2.1GB or 8GB. Try a partition
> > layout like so ...
>
> This is exactly what I always did with Red Hat and lilo on a drive that
> shared Windows and Linux. I could easily try this again but thought it
> should be unnecessary for two reasons. First, I am using grub now, which I
> thought supported lba by default. Second, without the whole drive allocated
> to Etch (i.e. no Windows partition at the start of the drive), I imagined the
> files needed by grub would not be placed past cylinder 1024. But maybe
> that's unpredictable.
Just because grub can find something doesn't mean that your bios can
boot it. Just to save the headache later, especially if I move the
drive from one computer to another, I _always_ put /boot in the first
partition on its own. If I have two drives, I'll put it on a raid1
partition for good measure.
Doug.
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