Bootloader Problems

Babel · n00b Joined: 03 Nov 2003 Posts: 12 Location: Portland, OR

I have been trying to install gentoo since saturday afternoon and am rapidly loosing my patience. I'm doing a stage 3 install on a computer I built from a collection of spare parts. The load goes fine right up until the first reboot on the hard drive itself where I get this:

GRUB Loading stage 1.5.

GRUB loading, please wait...
Error 2

I tried LILO and all it will do on boot is write L followed by half a screen of 99s.

The motherboard is an old ASUS P2B with a P2-266 in it. Thinking it was the old large hard drive problem because I was using a 20 gig drive as hda I reconfigured the system. Currently hda is a 3 gig drive with a 32 meg /boot partition (hda1) and the remainder as / (hda2). hdb is a dvd-rom drive. hdc is the 20 gig drive with a 512 meg swap partition (hdc1) and the remainder mounted as /home (hdc2). Now that I think about it the 20 gig had an old red hat install on it that booted fine while I was first building the machine so maybe it's not the large hard drive problem.

hda1 is formatted as ext2, hda2 and hdc2 are formatted as reiserfs.

My grub.conf is as follows:
default 0
timeout 10
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title=Gentoo Linux
root (hd0,0)
kernel (hd0,0)/kernel-2.4.20-gentoo-r8 root=/dev/hda2
initrd (hd0,0)/initrd-2.4.20-gentoo-r8

If anyone knows a solution to this I'd be very grateful. So far I'm very impressed with Gentoo, unfortunately it's failing the most important test. Booting after install.

Earthwings · Posted: Mon Nov 03, 2003 6:04 pm Post subject:

try setting the drive geometry in lilo.conf resp. grub.conf. see http://groups.google.de/groups?selm=qfrg6b.p9s.ln%40news.grayonline.id.au&oe=UTF-8&output=gplain and http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/html_mono/grub.html#geometry should describe the relevant part for grub.conf.

Babel · n00b Joined: 03 Nov 2003 Posts: 12 Location: Portland, OR

Thank you for the reply. While I couldn't seem to get the geometry line in grub.conf to matter what I ended up doing was setting the drive geometry in the bios instead of relying on auto detect. This seemed to do the trick and everything is booting fine.

Thanks again.