grub issues

taskara · Posted: Fri Apr 12, 2002 12:17 am Post subject: grub issues

hi all. I am installing gentoo and am liking what I see

however, I have a problem with grub.
my hd sits on hde (promise ata100 controller), which I believe in grub terms is hd4.

my partition layout is as follows:
hde1 = fat32
hde2 = /boot - ext3
hde5 = / - ext3
hde6 = /home - ext3
hde7 = swap

when issuing the command to install grub: root (hd4,4) it says it doesn't exist.

what DOES exist is hd0. And it picks up my root ext3 partition when I type root (hd0,4)

if I go ahead and install grub on hd0 anyway it failes to load upon reboot.

so I am confused as to why my hdd is hd0 (which should be my dvd drive) and not hd4 - I must be doing something wrong somewhere.. someone slap me..

any help much appreciated... so close.. yet so far..
man I love linux

taskara · Posted: Fri Apr 12, 2002 12:42 pm Post subject: fixed, well sorta ;)

grub sux... lemme say that..

after fiddling and fiddling with this biatch, I finally ran "emerge lilo" and compiled it, edited my lilo.conf file, installed it and rebooted.

what do you know it works like a treat.

I have NEVER liked grub.. lilo is the rox.

Guest · Posted: Fri Apr 12, 2002 6:30 pm Post subject:

Fist let me say GRUB rox

I believe hde is (hd5) (a=0, b=1...) and hde2 (your boot partition) is (hd5,1)

Anyways don't give up on GRUB, it works much better then LILO i.e you don't trash you forget to reinstall your boot loader after installing a new kernel, and it doesn't stop working if your partition's have changed.

taskara · Posted: Sat Apr 13, 2002 1:27 am Post subject:

hda=hd0 not hd1 - so hde should be hd4

but the thing is, I mounted my /dev/hde partitions for everything else.

but then grub sees it at hd0 - grub does not see hd1, hd2, hd3, hd4, hd5, hd6, or hd7 only hd0!

how can hde = hd0 ?

if there's a grub solution, then I'll use grub, but I can't find one, and lilo solved everything in an instant

fghellar · Posted: Sat Apr 13, 2002 1:55 am Post subject:

In lilo/linux slang,

While in grub slang,

That is, grub ignores CD/DVD/etc. drives. It only cares about hard disks (or floppies, but those would be fdn).

* Edited to add a link to the naming convention section of the grub manual.

taskara · Posted: Sat Apr 13, 2002 6:52 am Post subject: hmmm

ok.. interesting - I guess that could be what's happening, but following the installation guide (cause I never used grub b4, always lilo) it says:

"Your Linux partition /dev/hda1 is called (hd0,0) under GRUB... Hard drives count from zero rather than "a", and partitions start at zero rather than one. SO, /dev/hdb3 gets translated to (hd1,2), and /dev/hdd7 gets translated to (hd3,6)."

according this this - my hde should equate to hd4, and partitions hd4,0 etc

AAAANYWAY, grub can't see it on hd4, it sees it on hd0 for whatever reason, but I go ahead and install grub on hd0 anyway (mbr).

so how then should I configure grub ?

in my grub conf should I have:
"splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz" for example?
or
"splashimage=(hd4,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz"

I have tried both ways, and on reboot grub fails to load fully.

so maybe it just doesn't like promise controllers.. I have had a similar problem in lycoris (which I was using previous to this gentoo install) - it couldn't load grub either, upon reboot it had the grub setup shell. WEIRD

anyone out there installed gentoo on promise contoller ?

to everyone, I really appreciate your input, thanks!

+BroNNoS+ · Guest

Let me try to explain, I struggled with it also so I could be wrong. But then again I got it working ;-)

>when issuing the command to install grub: root (hd4,4) it says it doesn't exist.

root in grub means your boot partition!

If you are in grub you can find your boot partition with

grub> find /boot/grub/stage1

Whatever grubs comes back with should behind the command root in grub. If it is only hd0 it comes back with something esle is wrong with your installation.

I had something similar when I did not do the making and mounting of /mnt/gentoo before al other mounting. This is crucial because everything else gets mounted into /mnt/gentoo. So don't try to do all the mkdir's first and mount them afterwards.

Hopes this help somewhat!

taskara · Posted: Sat Apr 13, 2002 2:10 pm Post subject:

cool I'll give this a try

fghellar · Posted: Sat Apr 13, 2002 5:16 pm Post subject:

I think I found your problem...

Try this:

taskara · Posted: Sun Apr 14, 2002 2:47 am Post subject:

k I'll give it a try... and post my findings later, ta

NeOTheMaTriXM · n00b Joined: 14 Apr 2002 Posts: 6

you can also make a grub boot floppy with stage1 and stage2 on it

this floppy will boot on every system
(you don't need to have grub installed on your mbr or hd)

fghellar · Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2002 12:21 am Post subject:

Answering to the first post...

1) The hda/hdb/... notation is related to the IDE controllers:
IDE1=hda+hdb
IDE2=hdc+hdd
IDE3=hde+hdf
IDE4=hdg+hdh

2) In grub's notation, hd0 means the first hard disk, no matter where it is connected to.

3) In grub's notation, root is where the kernel is. So, in your case, it would be hde2, which translates to (hd0,1) = second partition on first hard disk.
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crimson · Posted: Sun Apr 28, 2002 5:43 pm Post subject:

I had this exact same problem, and that's why I'm troubleshooting from Windows right now. I have a promise controller, and in some distro's (with older kernels I think) my hard drive is HDA, and in this kernel, as well as Mandrake it's HDE.

I tried doing HD4,4 like he did and not working, I tried 0. I'm still a bit confused as to why my primary IDE is labeled HDE.

I'm going to try some of the things this guy has tried as well as hopefully being able to boot from the CD and copy bzImage to /boot again, although I did that on my last install and somehow it must not have worked. I might just try lilo, I'm familiar and satisfied with it anyway.

a.c. · Guest

I had some trouble with the grub config. I've used grub on and off for a while, so I was able to get it going pretty quickly.

First, I can't figure out how to use the grub shell for installation, so I used the alternative grub-install binary. This reads the disk, and installs grub.

I didn't have an mtab file for some reason -- perhaps I should not have been doing the grub install from the chrooted shell? -- so I had to hack one by hand. I just added the partitions from a df into /etc/mtab. After that, grub-install was ok; I worked up the config to dual-boot, and everything worked.

I hope this helps someone with the same problem. AC/D

Mr.Yucky · n00b Joined: 25 Aug 2002 Posts: 10

i just installed and got the same situation (as original situation w/promise), i didnt recall including any support for the card through compiling the kernel, should I? i dont remember seeing that option, anyways, i tried 4,0 and i also tried 0,0 -both to no avail.....ive had grub work fine with redhat but havent tried with other distros, anyone else have the same problem or know of a solution for this promise card?

oh ya when i tried the 0,0 it said "filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7"

Thanks

Mr.Yucky · n00b Joined: 25 Aug 2002 Posts: 10

ok, i recompiled my kernel so as to not leave out any support for the promise ata 100 controller didnt see much i did however throw in the promise support under "filesystems", still did not work still same error, i have a 60 gig maxtor w/promise card, im running win2k on first 7 gigs, winxp pro on next 4 gigs and then i have a 100 meg boot partition for gentoo, a 512 meg swap partition, and then a 3.5 partition for /. i still have lilo installed from mandrake 8.2, and grub installed fine in past wth redhat 7.2, but yet w/gentoo grub will not work, i only have one harddrive on computer so ive tried everyone's advice with using "root (hd0.0)" still gives error: "Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7".

Heck i even "emerge lilo" and then edited the /etc/lilo.conf and added entries but when i ran lilo it gives similiar error: "Device 0x2101: Partition type 0x07 does not seem suitable for a LILO boot sector"

anyone have any suggestions?
any are appreciated....
Thanks

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20485

What does your menu.lst file look like? Or have you not been able to get that far?
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Mr.Yucky · n00b Joined: 25 Aug 2002 Posts: 10

Sorry havent gotten that far...Also the boot partition is bootable, i made it bootable through fdisk, so that throws that solution out also....

Thanks

Is there anyone out there that has a Ata 100 Promise card that has Gentoo running? If so please let me know how u got it to run......How u got Grub to install or did U get it to install, Im thinking its cause my C: drive is Ntfs, but Mandrake and Redhat didnt have any problems with it.........Also I used Partition Magic to partition several times w/2k-xp, but I used Fdisk through Gentoo to make all the partitions for Gentoo....

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20485

I have a Promise TX2 that works just fine, but I'm not booting to it. Once I added Promise support in the kernel, all is well. Grub loads before the kernel though. How many HDs do you have in your system, and what channels are they connected to?
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Guest · Posted: Mon Aug 26, 2002 11:41 pm Post subject:

im running a cdrom as master on my primary controller (alone) a hp burner as master on my secondary (alone) then my sole 60 gig on the promise card alone.......i had mandrake installed with lilo before this and the lilo is still present, that shouldnt matter though-correct?

Mr.Yucky · n00b Joined: 25 Aug 2002 Posts: 10

that was my last post as guest, anyways so i booted up wth the xp cd and blew away lilo that was left from Mandrake....still nothing same situation...not sure whats goin wrong here...

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20485

Have you searched for 'promise' and 'grub' (and select the search for all terms option)? I came up with 26 results. I know this issue has been brought up, I'm just not certain what the solution is. Also, from the Grub shell, what happens if you type 'find /boot/grub/bzImage'?
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Mr.Yucky · n00b Joined: 25 Aug 2002 Posts: 10

Thanks alot for your help, I appreciate it, I've been all over this forum, no luck with solution, I thought I might just put grub on my boot partition then edit the Xp bootloader, when i ran "root (hd0,9)" command i get an error siliar to this: "ext3 filesystem ext2 partition" so, i gave up on this installation....That error made me think that maybe i typed in the wrong commands when i formatted the partitions....Thanks again for your concern.....Im in the process of Emerging System again, so wont be long till i "step up to the plate" again....

thanks

Answer to your Q':
that returned the correct answer:
hd0,9

Mr.Yucky · n00b Joined: 25 Aug 2002 Posts: 10

Well that was quite a learning experience....so what i found out was when i typed the command for:
#grub
#root (hd0,0)

it responded with:
Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7

but what i didnt realize is that if u go ahead and run:
#setup (hd0)

then-it installs anyways so that isnt really a error......anyways grub could be just a little bit more user/install friendly....

thanks again

also, when i typed grub, then root (hd0,9) -to install into the gentoo boot partition it responded with the statment that it was a ext2 filesystem but ext3 partition, ignore these statments if you get them, they dont appear to be errors........just complete the grub install with the command: setup (hd0) and then make the ***.lst file also i found out that if you have grub installed into the mbr then make sure you point grub to it with the "root (hd0,0)" command and not the root (hd0,9) command......