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stephelton
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 29 Mar 2004
Posts: 84
Location: Dallas, TX, USA
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 Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 7:44 pm Post subject: gentoo dual boot oddities |
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A few days ago my computer quit booting, out of nowhere. I use both winxp and gentoo on a daily basis, and end up rebooting several times a day. Seemingly out of nowhere it suddenly quit booting. It would hang after "Grub loading stage 1.5, please wait" (or something like that.)
I determined that my IDE and SATA drives were ordered differently and was able to use the LiveCD to modify grub / grub.conf and now grub and gentoo boots just fine.
WinXP on the other hand, doesn't. Before I describe the problem let me outline my drives according to grub:
hd0 - IDE hard disk, 160 GB
hd0,0 - 160 GB partition / vfat (C: in windows)
hd1 - SATA hard disk, 37 GB
hd1,0 - ~25 GB partition / ntfs (D: in windows)
hd1,1 - 512 MB partition / ext2
hd1,2 - 2 GB partition / swap
hd1,3 - ~10 GB partition, reiserfs
My setup is rather poor in that NTLDR / boot.ini / ntdetect.com are located on the C: (hd0,0) partition, but the rest of the XP OS is located on the D: (hd1,0) partition.
I've tried a number of ways to alleviate this problem:
1) edit grub so that XP attempts to boot from hd1,0: rootnoverify (hd1,0). This doesn't work because "NTLDR missing, hit ctrl + alt + delete to restart"
2) attempt to boot as I always had: rootnoverify (hd0,0). This doesn't work because it spits me back to the grub command line. I'm guessing that NTLDR fails because it's not finding the drives in the order it expects, and the chainloader +1 effect fails so grub takes back over. I'm likely to be wrong about this though.
3) attempt to boot from the IDE hard drive first (changing the boot device order). I'm guessing that at one point I had grub set on the MBR of this drive. This is when I get "Grub loading stage 1.5, please wait."
I suppose I could copy NTLDR etc to the NTFS (hd1,0) drive but I'd rather not because I'd have to write to NTFS and I'm under the impression that this is a bad idea. Plus, I'd have to recompile my kernel and... I'd rather not... I could pop in the XP disk and do fixmbr but i'm pretty sure it would kill grub.
Any ideas?
Thanks in advance.
~Stephen
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Headrush
Watchman
Joined: 06 Nov 2003
Posts: 5597
Location: Bizarro World
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| Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 8:13 pm Post subject: |
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| Please post the /boot/grub/grub.conf you have installed now. |
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stephelton
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 29 Mar 2004
Posts: 84
Location: Dallas, TX, USA
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| Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 8:18 pm Post subject: |
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Sorry I had intended to do that! Here you go:
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default 0
timeout 6
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title=Gentoo Linux 2.6
root (hd0,1)
kernel /kernel-2.6 root=/dev/hdg4
title=Windows XP Professional SP2
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
title=Windows XP Professional SP2 test
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
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stephelton
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 29 Mar 2004
Posts: 84
Location: Dallas, TX, USA
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Headrush
Watchman
Joined: 06 Nov 2003
Posts: 5597
Location: Bizarro World
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| Posted: Sun Jan 15, 2006 8:04 pm Post subject: |
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In what order are the disks being recognized?
You had said that the 160GB was (hd0), yet in your grub entry for Gentoo you have it looking at (hd0,1) for kernel images, which doesn't exist. Obviously you are looking at the second partition of the other disk. You said Gentoo boots, so is it safe to say that the 160 GB drive is actually detected as (hd1)? |
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stephelton
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 29 Mar 2004
Posts: 84
Location: Dallas, TX, USA
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| Posted: Sun Jan 15, 2006 8:39 pm Post subject: |
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Well that is indeed my /boot/grub/grub.conf, and the first entry works (as does the splash image.) In gentoo I run "grub" and using the tab completion discover that hd0 is the ide drive and hd1 is the sata drive.
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Headrush
Watchman
Joined: 06 Nov 2003
Posts: 5597
Location: Bizarro World
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| Posted: Sun Jan 15, 2006 9:03 pm Post subject: |
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This doesn't seem right.
If the drive has only one partition and the grub entry says to get the files from the second partition, (hd0,1), how is that possible?
The only options I can think of are:- The grub installed was not from the file you are currently using.
- You are using the Boot disk selector of you BIOS, which changes device mappings
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stephelton
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 29 Mar 2004
Posts: 84
Location: Dallas, TX, USA
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| Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2006 12:06 am Post subject: |
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Thanks for your help.
| Quote: | | The grub installed was not from the file you are currently using. |
Well the menu shows up exactly as it should according to that grub.conf that I pasted. So I should think that isn't an option? Or perhaps grub was not set up correctly... ?
| Quote: | | You are using the Boot disk selector of you BIOS, which changes device mappings |
I didn't do this until the problem started happening. Since I've both used the boot selector and changed the order of devices checked for boot information.
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stephelton
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 29 Mar 2004
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Location: Dallas, TX, USA
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r.stiltskin
Apprentice
Joined: 11 Aug 2004
Posts: 227
Location: Brooklyn
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| Posted: Fri Jan 20, 2006 5:18 am Post subject: |
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Have you tried running fdisk to print the partition tables of both drives?
# fdisk /dev/hda
and then
Command (m for help): p
to print the partition table.
# fdisk /dev/hdb
and so on... |
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