Grub Error Collection [Part 6]

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue Sep 05, 2006 10:43 am Post subject:

aero,

add noapic to the end of the kernel line in grub.conf
You can do that as you boot, for one boot only. When the grub menu appears, press e for edit.
Make your edit, press return, then b for boot.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

G F0rce 1 · Posted: Tue Sep 05, 2006 11:17 am Post subject: [GRUB] Configuration problem

Hey guys, I have a weird problem with Grub. I have followed the partitioning scheme of the Gentoo Linux x86 Handbook, and I use the Grub config from that handbook, that looks correct to me. But when booting with Grub I get the error Error 15: File not found.
My /dev/hda1 is my boot partition, my /dev/hda2 is my swap partition and /dev/hda3 is my root partition. My grub config looks like this (exactly from the guide) :

default 0
timeout 30
title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.17-r5
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/kernel-2.6.17-gentoo-r5 root=/dev/hda3

I have mounted the /boot partition during the install so I can verify that the kernel really is on the boot partition and not on /dev/hda3/ . What can be the problem?
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G F0rce 1 · kernel /kernel-2.6.17-gentoo-r5 root=/dev/hda3

When I change

NeddySeagoon · kernel /kernel-2.6.17-gentoo-r5 root=/dev/hda3

G F0rce 1,

I've moved your posts here, since its a grub issue.

Since

G F0rce 1 · Posted: Tue Sep 05, 2006 2:49 pm Post subject:

jmbsvicetto · Posted: Wed Sep 06, 2006 12:53 am Post subject:

Hi.

All you need to do to create the boot symlink is to mount the /boot partition, change to it and do:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Sep 06, 2006 11:11 am Post subject:

G F0rce 1,

The symlink is no longer your problem. You got past that issue by removing the /boot from your grub.conf kernel line. That part of my post was just for information.

Something is missing in your kernel, or you have fixed the kernel then messed up copying it to boot, so you are still starting the old kernel.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

JugglingSuns120 · n00b Joined: 16 Oct 2005 Posts: 15

Hi, in a recent move to college I decided to take my harddrive from my computer and turn it into an external drive for my laptop. Linux is installed on the external drive and I would like to install grub on this drive to be able to use linux without touching my laptops MBR. (the former setup had grub installed on the primary while linux was on the slave) To do this I booted up knoppix and chrooted into my linux environment. From there I mounted boot (sda1) and then proceded to install grub using the grub shell. From grub shell I issued the following

<----->
root (hd1,2)
(This returns the proper disk partition for my root which is on sda3)
setup (hd1)

<----->

This errors out with ERROR 15 telling me that it cant find the proper files. I checked to see that the files were in fact there on my boot partition and I can see them using ls. I also checked to make sure boot was mounted as rwx which it was. Any ideas on why I am unable to install grub? Thanks in advance

AJ

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Sep 06, 2006 6:27 pm Post subject:

JugglingSuns120,

Close ...root (hd1,2) should be the root for grubs files, your /boot. not the root of the kernels filesystem.

The kernel and grub use the term root to mean different things
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

G F0rce 1 · Posted: Wed Sep 06, 2006 6:37 pm Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Sep 06, 2006 6:43 pm Post subject:

G F0rce 1,

I need to know your IDE disk drive chipset driver for that. Using the liveCD, not in the chroot, run the lspci command.
It will show you all of the hardware attached to PCI interfaces.
Post the line that show your IDE interface. Post it all if you are not sure.
_________________
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

JugglingSuns120 · n00b Joined: 16 Oct 2005 Posts: 15

Thank you very much, I read the documentation wrong when I refered back to it. That should get me back up and running. Thanks for your help

AJ

G F0rce 1 · Posted: Wed Sep 06, 2006 6:49 pm Post subject:

Hey NeddySaegoon, that would be this, seems pretty standard:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Sep 06, 2006 7:22 pm Post subject:

G F0rce 1,

Thats it. Its an Intel ICH something. You need these settings in your kernel
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

G F0rce 1 · Posted: Wed Sep 06, 2006 9:05 pm Post subject:

reneviht · n00b Joined: 09 Aug 2006 Posts: 53

Hello, all.

I two hard drives in my computer: a SATA drive that I boot Gentoo off of, and an IDE drive from an old Windows computer. Gentoo was working well for the most part until wanted to experiment with booting off my IDE drive. I edited my grub.conf to include the code from the Gentoo Handbook (except with the (hd0,0) changed to match my system). When I did, I got error message 17. It is not exactly the same as error message 17 detailed in the Gentoo Grub Error Collection, as it does not print out any segment of grub.conf, nor does it print the explaination of the error message. Assuming I've read the Grub manual correctly, this means the problem occurs in the stage 1.5.

At any rate, I assumed the problem caused by the new commands I stuck in, so I booted on the installation CD and chrooted in to remove them. However, after I did this, the problem still remains. I'm not sure what I broke in the process. If anyone has any suggestions, I would appreciate it.

Incidentally, if it is possible to gain root access from the graphical live CD so I can mount my drive to edit the files and use graphical web browsers to look for help, I would also appreciate instructions for this. Switching between the tty's and using links doesn't come natural to me yet.
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jmbsvicetto · Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2006 2:38 am Post subject:

Hi.

To get root access on the GLI all you have to do is open a console and type sudo su -. That is somewhat hidden in the Sticky su on this forum.
How did you install GRUB into the MBR? Please post the exact commands. Have you changed your BIOS to boot from IDE and back to SATA?
Post your grub.conf file so that we can try to help.
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Jarhead · Guru Joined: 26 Mar 2004 Posts: 474

Hey all, I've got a strange one here. I'm creating a firewall/file and print server for my fiance (she's on a laptop, saves plugging in the printer, etc) on an old Pavilion 4535. Grub.conf is pointed to hd(0,0), and the startup chatter recognizes the hard drive correctly as a Quantum Fireball. However, boot then spits back that VFS is unable to mount root on unknown-block(3,3). I re-installed grub and double-checked the BIOS, fstab, and mtab. Everything is in order as far as I can tell. I don't understand why it would be pointing to 3,3...
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reneviht · n00b Joined: 09 Aug 2006 Posts: 53

Thank you for your prompt reply.

My grub.conf is as follows.

jmbsvicetto · Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2006 4:00 am Post subject:

Hi.

Gooserider · Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2006 6:15 pm Post subject: GRUB Hard Disk Error

I've read all 11 pages of this thread, and an assortment of other stuff, and have yet to see my problem mentioned :!:

I can't seem to get GRUB to recognize my hard drive, as all attempts to boot off it give me the response "GRUB Hard Disk Error". Accordng to the Gnu GRUB manual, this means:

reneviht · n00b Joined: 09 Aug 2006 Posts: 53

jmbsvicetto, thanks for asking about the GRUB installation. It set me right into attempting to re-install GRUB. When I got install errors, I used fdisk to try to find why GRUB couldn't recognize my boot partition's filesystem. Apparently, my boot partition was transformed into a FAT16 partition (or VFAT, or something similar). I can only assume this happened as part of the code I added. Anyway, after using fdisk to delete and re-create the partition and following the installation guide's instructions for installing GRUB, I can once more boot onto my drive properly. Thank you for your assistance.
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96140 · Retired Dev Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 1324

Gooserider · Posted: Fri Sep 08, 2006 12:27 am Post subject:

nightmorph

Gooserider · Posted: Fri Sep 08, 2006 1:50 am Post subject:

A further update...

Given that I could boot off a floppy, I decided to see if I could further narrow down the problem - I followed the instructions on Grub from the Ground up on creating a minimal grub boot floppy, then used the floppy to boot the box.

This gave me a grub prompt, and I then followed their procedure for booting from the grub command line. I got a fair number of errors in the boot messages (it appears something is funky in conf.d, alot of services failed to start properly) but I did get to a login prompt and was able to log in to the root account.

Unless I have a bad misunderstanding of the process, that I got to the login prompt means that grub did everything it was supposed to do. I might have other issues, but those are a different problem, not grub related, and not a concern for this thread.

So, it appears the problem is something in the hard drive configuration, perhaps the MBR :?:

The system appears to be able to boot as long as it doesn't have to look at the initial hard drive setup. Mount sees all the partitions, which would suggest that Nightmorph's suggestion of the BIOS not supporting bigger drives doesn't work. (also the /boot partition is below the 1024 cylinder limit in any case)

What I'm starting to wonder is if the problem might have something to do with the way I initially fdisked the drive :?:

As you may recall from the earlier discussion, I initially used the MS-DOS 5.0 fdisk to create partition #1, about 200mb, FAT16. That fdisk did NOT properly recognize the size of the drive, it thought it was only 8GB (remember the old DOS drive size limits?)

Then I came back with the Linux fdisk (off the 2006.0 cd) and ADDED the remaining partitions, but I never touched the DOS partition #1

I did it this way in part because I didn't want to destroy the existing partition, and also because I remember from various sources seeing a reccomendation that one should only create partitions for a given O/S using that O/S's native fdisk utility.

Could my problem be that the DOS fdisk put some kind of strange structure on the MBR that wasn't completely cleaned up by the Linux fdisk? Or possibly the drive just doesn't like being fdisked by different programs?

If so, any suggestions as to a fix, preferably something that won't trash the install that I already have?

Thanks,

Gooserider
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