Freekin Ferucked

[padrazo]

just finished my first liveCD install and on reboot I get a flash of white letters then just a black screen.

Dual Booted Gentoo with Win2003
Windows is on primary 80gig drive in 1st 15gig paritian
eg hda1 w NTFS file sys

/dev/hda2 /boot ext2 64M
/dev//hda3 /swap swap 1gig
/dev/hda5 / reiserfs 30gigs
/dev/hda6 /work1 reiserfs 7gigs
/dev/hda7 /work2 reiserfs the rest

second drive [hdb] is all NTFS too full to give up for Gentoo right now.
Machine: AthalonXP2500 with Shuttle Mobo w/Nforce chip,
ATI9200 card, cdrom, floppy, and 2 80 gig ide drives

The Install went slow but well as much time spent reading the docs.
I emerged just about everything I could see to emerge. Baffled as to what I may have screwwed up.

Q1. can one boot the installed system using the liveCD? How?
Q2. should I just start over?
_________________
padrazo

[avendesora]

Not really sure I understand. Do you get past the bootloader (grub, I guess)?
Can you still boot to your W2K install?

If you don't even reach grub, I'd simply suggest going back to the livecd and repeating
the install steps relating to grub (or lilo).

[Tii]

[monkey89]

Do you have a splash image in grub? Try disabling it.

(LiveCD, chroot, mount /boot, edit grub.conf)

[nixnut]

Check your grub.conf. If there's a string vga=791 (or some other number) change that in vga=normal. If that makes a difference your framebuffer setup needs some attention.
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Please add [solved] to the initial post's subject line if you feel your problem is resolved. Help answer the unanswered

talk is cheap. supply exceeds demand

[padrazo]

I am using Knoppix LiveCD to take a peek at things:
I find grub.conf on hda2,

my grub.conf
--------------
default 0
timeout 30
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/spash.xpm.gz

title=Gentoo Linux 2.4.25
root (hd0,1)
kernel /kernel-2.4.25-gentoo-r1 root=/dev/ram0 init=/linuxrc real_root=/dev/hda5 vga=792
initrd /initrd-2.4.25-gentoo-r1

# For booting Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition
title=Windows 2003 Rocks
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
---------------------------------
my boot.ini file for windows is still on hda1
I thought I was going to destroy it when I installed grub - guess not.
it this normal.
-----
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows Server 2003, Enterprise" /fastdetect

-----------
my fstab

----

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
# $Header: /home/cvsroot/gentoo-src/rc-scripts/etc/fstab,v 1.14 2003/10/13 20:03:38 azarah Exp $
#
# noatime turns off atimes for increased performance (atimes normally aren't
# needed; notail increases performance of ReiserFS (at the expense of storage
# efficiency). It's safe to drop the noatime options if you want and to
# switch between notail and tail freely.

# <fs> <mountpoint> <type> <opts> <dump/pass>

# NOTE: If your BOOT partition is ReiserFS, add the notail option to opts.
/dev/hda2 /boot ext2 noauto,noatime 1 1
/dev/hda5 / reiserfs noatime,notail 0 0
/dev/hda3 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hda6 /work1 reiserfs noatime,notail 0 0
/dev/hda7 /work2 reiserfs noatime,notail 0 0
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,ro 0 0
#/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto 0 0

# NOTE: The next line is critical for boot!
none /proc proc defaults 0 0

# glibc 2.2 and above expects tmpfs to be mounted at /dev/shm for
# POSIX shared memory (shm_open, shm_unlink).
# (tmpfs is a dynamically expandable/shrinkable ramdisk, and will
# use almost no memory if not populated with files)
# Adding the following line to /etc/fstab should take care of this:

none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
----------

Ok, not sure if above looks good or bad.
But I will now reboot Gentoo LiveCD to see if I can edit grub.conf and change vga=792 to vga=normal

Thanks for all the help
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padrazo

[padrazo]

Don't know how to chroot

eg this error:
chroot: /bin/bash: No such file or directory

_________________
padrazo

[padrazo]

Das Sauding Anyways!
Ok I did all these commands and chroot seemed to work!
---
# swapon /dev/hda3
# mount /dev/hda5 /mnt/gentoo
# mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/gentoo/boot
# mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc
# cd /mnt/gentoo
# chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash
# env-update
# source /etc/profile
---

I think I maybe in Gentoo land now
_________________
padrazo

[padrazo]

commented out the spash image and removed vga=
from grub - Now I get a readable boot screen but neither windows not gentoo will boot
_________________
padrazo

[thechris]

ok, you seem to be on your way. what errors do you get on windows/linux boot attempts. my assumption is that there is a typo in the grub.conf. possibly the HDD isn't on primary master, and thus isn't (hd0,0). or maybe you have an invalid character somewhere.

if nothing else, use lilo.

[thechris]

on mine i explicilty re-state the /boot location:
root (hd0,0)
kernel (hd0,0)/kernel-2.6.5-gentoo-rc1 root=/dev/ram0 init=/linuxrc real_root=/dev/md0
initrd (hd0,0)/initrd-2.6.5-gentoo-rc1

note that i use a different kernel, and my boot device is a raid array.

[padrazo]

I almost gave up. Now I have reinstalled windows to be able to at least boot windows. In continuing work with Gentoo I would like to use either the win2003 boot loader to boot Gentoo, or put Lilo and/or grub if possible on a floppy disks to boot.

In further playing with grub.conf I was able to boot Gentoo, but the best I got was a screen with garbled letters and verticle lines of white dots. there was a command line but no commands were accepted.
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padrazo