<solved> Grub "Error 2" ??

appleshampoo · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Sep 2004 Posts: 116

I've been futzing around with the hard disk configuration on one of my boxen, and now grub won't boot my kernel, failing with the mysterious "error 2." According to the grub manual (http://www.linuxselfhelp.com/gnu/grub/html_chapter/grub_13.html), error 2 means "a file requested is not a regular file, but something like a symbolic link, directory, or FIFO."

I have booted from a live CD and checked the the drive with the boot partition on it, and it looks fine, and the kernel file is there and grub.conf looks good....any ideas what might be wrong?

Also I just ran e2fsck -cc on the boot partition and it came back okay....so it seems like the drive is okay. I really don't want to start from scratch here as I have a perfectly good gentoo install on this stupid drive....

batistuta · Veteran Joined: 29 Jul 2005 Posts: 1384 Location: Aachen

have you tried running boot in iteractive mode? Most likely you are passing a wrong location or command, and running in iterative mode could help you to track this problem.
What have you exactly changed in your HD configuration?

appleshampoo · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Sep 2004 Posts: 116

Okay figured this out...in case anyone else is getting random "Error 2" grub errors when all of your directories and hard drives are set up correctly and everything. The problem is that I had been messing with the IDE HDD autodetection settings in my BIOS earlier, and honestly I don't know exactly what I did to make it work again, but tweaking them made grub work again.

batistuta · Veteran Joined: 29 Jul 2005 Posts: 1384 Location: Aachen

probably your BIOS reported the order of your HD in a different way, so your HD0 and HD1 got swapped or something. The grub command line usually allows you to find out the order, but if you've solved it, then cool!

Please mark the issue as [solved] in the subject