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Re: System Dorked -- Help! (Interim solution!)



On Sunday 25 October 2015 08:19:41 Gene Heskett wrote:

> On Sunday 25 October 2015 06:57:06 David Baron wrote:

> > Using the live disk, went back to the old (failing!) 80gig disk,

> > edited back to where I was, bound the /dev and chroot and mounted what

> > I needed.

> > update-initramfs and lilo worked without any segfault.

> >

> > So back up. Time to buy another big disk and move stuff or reinstall

> > with Jesse. Trouble is these big SATAs are not so great. That 80gig

> > IDE which smart claims is pre-failure (but does not totally support)

> > predates them all.

>

> Another thought comes to mind since you mentioned a big disk, but I don't

> recall the size if it has been quoted in this thread.

>

> But In installing linuxcnc (debian wheezy based) on fresh disks, I have

> twice now been forced to allocate a /boot partition at the beginning of

> a 2 terabyte disk.

>

> This may not be the reason, but my theory is that by the time the install

> gets around to installing grub, (its the last thing it does) its boot

> files are too far into the disk for bios/lilo/grub2 to find them, so the

> reboot at the end of the install fails.

>

> The worst part of that is that the partitioner will not accept a 1

> gigabyte partition, which is a great plenty, so I was forced to use 5%

> of the disk as a boot partition.

>

> That is about 47 gigabytes, of which <1% is actually used. Ridiculous,

> but it works. Those 3 machines would be happy as clams with a 20

> gigabyte disk. Even SSD's are bigger than that these days.

>

> So I am left wondering if this might be a solution to your boot problem.

>

> lilo has been out of favor for a goodly piece of a decade, and with even

> grub1 being far more versatile, I am amazed to hear of someone still

> using it. I have no clue what its LBA capabilities are in light of the

> sizes of todays drives.

>

> If someone could elaborate on that, it might also be of educational value

> here.

>

> Cheers, Gene Heskett

 

I started with wheezy 64 bit install and grub2. Did not have any clue how it worked but it did. When upgraded to Sid, added a kernel and wanted to keep the older on around just-in-case, I had no idea how to do this with Grub2 so I went back to Lilo. Lilo also makes it easy of have a systemd and older-style init choice, the latter saved me recently.

 

Running afoul of having two 1 terra disks around could have been the problem. I have no understanding of this business. I had no problem reading and writing the partition I wanted to make root. Just could not do anything in it, either chroot or on boot into the system which malfunctioned.

 

How do I make custom boot menus, kernel, init choices and such using the Grub?


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