Grub Error Collection [Part 2]

thoughts · Posted: Fri Aug 19, 2005 3:40 am Post subject:

I just installed Gentoo 2005.1 on a single-partition system (not counting swap) using the x86 quick-install guide. But grub is giving me an error.

I have a single IDE disk with /dev/hda1 as the only partition (other than swap), i.e. it is the boot partition and the root partition.

I compiled my kernel (not genkernel) and then put this in /boot/grub/grub.conf:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Aug 19, 2005 10:33 am Post subject:

xkalibur1554,

I have a very similar install, /boot raid1, swap, two identical partitions managed by the kernel, root raid 0, other partitions raid0.
Grub works fine here. I'm on an Athlon XP +3200.

With a raid1 boot, either grub or lilo should just work, since they will both ignore the raid bit.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Aug 19, 2005 10:39 am Post subject:

thoughts,

Two things.
grub-install is looking in /etc/fstab and finding an entry for /boot, then trying to mount it but of course, it can't.
Comment out the /boot entry here.

As you don't have a real /boot partition, you need to change this

xkalibur1554 · Apprentice Joined: 31 Mar 2005 Posts: 206 Location: USA

neddy,

how did you install your gentoo system, with the raid 1 /boot, and raid 0 everything else? maybe if you give me a how to the way you did it from scratch, i will be able to do the same. thank you for all of your help so far.

john
_________________
"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
~Einstein

xkalibur1554 · Apprentice Joined: 31 Mar 2005 Posts: 206 Location: USA

neddy,

when i manually install grub by,

xkalibur1554 · Apprentice Joined: 31 Mar 2005 Posts: 206 Location: USA

neddy,

maybe this will help, when it says

thoughts · Posted: Fri Aug 19, 2005 5:53 pm Post subject:

xkalibur1554 · Apprentice Joined: 31 Mar 2005 Posts: 206 Location: USA

does it matter that i have the promie fasttrack 378 controller, and that sets up the two sata drives in a 2+0 striped raid 0 before anything else happens? do i need to make it a raid 1 through there? the only place i created a raid 1, was on the drives through linux. in this promise controller, should i not have them raided in that? should i just have it set up as two disks? then linux can make the arrays instead of havving them already in arrays?
_________________
"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
~Einstein

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Aug 19, 2005 6:28 pm Post subject:

xkalibur1554,

Heres my RAID story, Once Upon a Time ... (sorry)
For a long time I had a single IDE drive install, then I fancied playing with raid, so I added two SATA drives,
partitioned them, put the partitions into raid sets (at this time all RAID 0) and made my filesystems. I had to add raid0 to my normal kernel, emerge raidtools along the way and create an /etc/raidtab.
I copied my working system over to the raid setup but left /boot on the single IDE so I could test. I only added an entry to grub.conf to point root to /dev/md1 so booting was still from the IDE drive but everything else was from the RAID0 on SATA.

With a half and half, I tried to install grub on my RAID0 /boot, only to find out you can't. Grub does not use the kernel and has no concept of raid chunk size, so after it reads the first chunk, it doesn't swap drives. I found a page (maybe even the gentoo handbook for version 1.4-rc4) that said to make /boot raid1 and all would be well.

I created my raid1 /boot in degraded mode, so it was a mirror with one working partition and one dud, made the ext2 filesystem. Then copied my IDE /boot to the degraded raid1 and installed grub to the working part of the raid.

At this time grub could see (hd0, my /dev/hda, (hd1, my /dev/sda and (hd2, my /dev/sdb, grub was only installed on the MBR of (hd0 and (hd1

To make sure I understood what was going on I created a number of grub.conf entries that all pointed to the same kernel using root=/dev/md1

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Aug 19, 2005 6:33 pm Post subject:

xkalibur1554,

Its trying to read stage 2 from the floppy - Oops
The manual grub install should fix that.

If not, try the --no-floppy option when you start grub to do the grub install
See

xkalibur1554 · Apprentice Joined: 31 Mar 2005 Posts: 206 Location: USA

i swear i have done the same as you in regards to setting up the raid 1 and 0. and i also did what you said for installing grub. the only difference is that my drives are raid 0 via bios, they are striped to begin with before i make the raid in linux, should i not have it like that?
_________________
"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
~Einstein

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Aug 19, 2005 6:46 pm Post subject:

xkalibur1554,

Ahh.

Linux supports three sorts of raid. Hardware raid, you don't have that.

BIOS software raid, or software raid on a plug in card. This is called dmraid and the dmraid module drives the BIOS like WIndows would. Thats thats the only reason for using this form of raid. With BIOS raid, you put the drives into a raid set, then make partitions on the raid set. All the partitions are the same raid class. Grub will not work with BIOS raid either.
Lastly there is kernel raid. Its not compatible with Windows. You partition your drives, put the partitions into raid sets. This means you can have different raid levels on the same drive. This is what I use. I have a SIL 3112 RAID controller that offers BIOS raid but I do not use that feature.

From your last post, you have a hybrid BIOS raid/kernel raid. You need to use the drives as independant drives.

Don't do anythis rash, like reinstalling just yet. there may well be some detials we have not communicated very well.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

xkalibur1554 · Apprentice Joined: 31 Mar 2005 Posts: 206 Location: USA

ok, i think i figured it out. i took off that crazy BIOS raid, and set them up as two independent sata drives, and i can say we made the most progress ever as of yet. it gets to the splash screen, and i can see the title and everything. the problem now is when you push enter to boot the system the screen just stays black. now i feel this may be due to the vesafb option in my grub.conf. i used that because i was following the amd64 install, but i did not use genkernel, and i do not think i compile frame buffer support in. i am not sure though. any tips from thsi point would be great. i am finally getting somewhere. thank you.
_________________
"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
~Einstein

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Aug 19, 2005 7:23 pm Post subject:

xkalibur1554,

Hmm. I'm not sure whats beneth your raid but the kernel should at least draw on the screen.
Do you get the

gbuseman · n00b Joined: 06 Jun 2005 Posts: 5

Good Day to all,

I am building a new Gentoo, my previous one crashed. I have 2.6.12 load on an 80 ide in a IBM T41P.

I get this error at boot:

The root block device is unspecidied or not detected.

Please specify a device to boot, or "shell" for a shell...

if I enter /dev/hda3 at the boot () prompt the machine continues to boot.

I have tried changing the root (hd0,0) to (hd0,2) but no help.

Suggestions?????

JanTheMan · n00b Joined: 20 Aug 2005 Posts: 26

hi
i just have installed my gentoo 2005.1 but cant figure out how to change console resolution. it is fine with livecd but seems to be 600x400 when i load linux...tried few things but none of them worked... the last one ive tried was from http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_fbsplash#Configuring_Your_Bootloader but it says that initrd file cannot be found....(error 15)

my grub file is

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Aug 20, 2005 12:16 pm Post subject:

gbuseman,

It looks like you have an error in your grub.conf file.
The root (hdx,y) points to grubs root, not the kernels root filesystem.
Its grubspeak for your /boot.

Can you post your partition layout and your grub.conf please
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Aug 20, 2005 12:21 pm Post subject:

JanTheMan,

You will only have an initrd if you used genkernel to make your kernel.
This needs to be one long line in grub.conf - is it?

JanTheMan · n00b Joined: 20 Aug 2005 Posts: 26

NeddySeagoon

right..i had used genkernel as some of things wudnt work but ive figured it out and uninstalled genkernel.. i did everything exactly as it said on the link in prev message..configured my kernel manually and enabled:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Aug 20, 2005 1:30 pm Post subject:

JanTheMan,

Framebuffer Splash needs other things in an initrd to make it work.

Its worth selecting a Boot Logo under Graphics support -> Logo configuration.
If you are actually using the framebuffer consol, you will get a Penguin in the top left of the screen.

I think the next step is to remove Framebuffer Splash (just for now) and add in the boot logo, so we can see which console driver is actually being used.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

JanTheMan · n00b Joined: 20 Aug 2005 Posts: 26

NeddySeagoon,

i disabled support for the framebuffer splash and enabled logo configurationn (all logos with "*") as uve said, but nothing happend again...it just loads with fat letters and nothing else..no any logos or something else..i dont know how to check what console driver is used because im completely new to linux so if u can explain to me in more detail please :roll:

but for some reason i believe that no drivers used at all :lol:

ive got ati x800 xt graphic card as lspci says..if it somehow helps.. thanx for ur help again

mizpelled2becool · n00b Joined: 21 Aug 2005 Posts: 2 Location: NC

Hi all,

Although I've used other Linux distros this is my first stab at Gentoo. I read and followed the install manual installing gentoo-sources manually and used grub-install to install grub. I setup the config file exactly like in the manual (except I subsistiuted in 2.6.12-r9) However once I finally got to the reboot step, when it comes back up I'm shown a grub terminal. I tried specifying the kernel and configfile by using the appropriate grub commands but no matter what I do, when I enter the 'boot' command my machine hangs. What could I have done so that it doesn't find the kernel I thought I specified im the config file? If I made an error to my grub config file, how do I get to it now to correct it?

Thanks.

JanTheMan · n00b Joined: 20 Aug 2005 Posts: 26

mizpelled2becool,

to get to ur grub.conf file use LiveCD or i think you can edit it in Grub when it loads if you have a dual boot (Linux and other OS like windows)...

For LiveCD:

syg00 · Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2005 10:11 am Post subject:

And once you've done all that, post it here so we can all have a chance to help ...
Also output of

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2005 10:45 am Post subject:

JanTheMan,

Do