Bizzar Grub Issue -- any help, possibly not software

thechris · Veteran Joined: 12 Oct 2003 Posts: 1203

This is really bizzar. I've been dual booting across gentoo and windowsXP for the last 2 weeks. in anycase everything was working just fine. I had to do some work in that one windows program that justifies dual booting. In anycase my friend asks to burn a CD. i don't have burning software in windows.

so i tell him to reboot into linux. He's already put the blank CD into the drive.

so we reboot. and it comes up: "grub loading stag 1.5"
then
"grub loading please wait"

so we wait. for 5 minutes.

at this point i'm mad. even though grub has worked fine for months, it suddenly didn't!

so i go to the live CD to try LILO. I can not chroot into my gentoo environment. i get an error: "Kernel is too old".

this is kinda vague, I know. the CD is the cd I installed gentoo with -- the 2004.0 cd. there are still 2.6.7 kernels in /boot from my original install.

I also tried disconnecting and reconnecting the HDDs. The HDDs are listed in the BIOS and fdisk correctly lists the partition table.

/boot is on an ext2 filesystem that is unmounted after use.

the files on /boot seem ok, i can edit grub.conf, but it is correct -- it has worked for over a month!

any idea what caused this to happen to grub?

siro · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 20 Mar 2004 Posts: 102

Hi,

I dont know if this will solve your problem but its worth trying.

1) Boot from your livecd
2) run grub from your live cd (if its in the livecd) or mount the partition and run it from there
3) youll have a console now, hda is hd0 for grub and hda1 is (hd0,0), I boot from hda and have my boot partition in hda1 so in my case i type:

Ateo · Posted: Fri Dec 17, 2004 8:03 am Post subject:

Hmm. Have you run fsck on your boot partition?

If worse comes to worse, boot into the live CD, reformat your boot partition then reinstall grub and recompile your kernel + any modules you might need. I can't think of why/how having a blank cdr in the drive would wreck your boot partition.... weird.

thechris · Veteran Joined: 12 Oct 2003 Posts: 1203

posting this from links2, which may or may not have a working refresh option...

thanks for the good advice, unfortunantly it did not work. /boot (/dev/hda) is clean. further, grub segfaults when run, as does the grub-installer script.

BlackEdder · Posted: Fri Dec 17, 2004 7:57 pm Post subject:

The livecd kernel is 2.4, that's why you can't chroot in. Try giving smp as boot option, that should load a 2.6 kernel (think 2004.0 already had that option)

siro · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 20 Mar 2004 Posts: 102

Boot with the liveCD and take a look at you grub directory, do you have a device.map file? If you do it should look something like this;

(fd0) /dev/fd0
(hd0) /dev/hda

If its not there or if it looks very different please post it.

thechris · Veteran Joined: 12 Oct 2003 Posts: 1203

well, good news. I got my new computer early, thus this issue is less important. as it stands, i'm expecting the problem to go away when i reinstall the OS on that computer. i have to switch a lot of hard disks around, and a reinstall was definatly warrented given the number of other issues (kde had no wm, i could not update software, ect)