Grub weirdness

Dolio · l33t Joined: 17 Jun 2002 Posts: 650

As you may or may not recall, when I first installed Gentoo, I was unable to get Grub working. It was never able to install stage-1.5 onto my disk.

Since then, I've tried off and on to see if I could get it installed ("Maybe I've done something to make it work since I last tried..."

), without any success. However, tonight was different. I was fooling around with grub after reading some grub-related posts, and I did the following:

> find vmlinux-2.4.19-r7-nosound

Which is the name of my kernel, of course. The answer came back:
(hd0,6)

Which I thought nothing much of, because that's what's supposed to happen on my box. So this time, I said
> root (hd0,6)
> setup (hd0,6)

And Eterm screwed up as it sometimes does and wrote a couple lines of text over itself, but I thought I had glimpsed success. I quit out of grub and went back in another console and did the following:

> find vmlinux-2.4.19-r7-nosound
Error 15: File not found

So I said, "Ah ha!" A different result, with no explanation (other than the fact that apparently whatever supreme being you might happen to believe in came down and made my computer work for a minute and a half, but no longer), so I'm not about try and do setup (hd0,6) again, because that would destroy the boot record.

So, being the adventurous fellow I am, I rebooted my machine. I also started getting my Gentoo boot CD, because I didn't think that there was a snowball's chance in hell that Grub was actually installed on my machine. However, lo and behold, the grub boot menu came up, and I got to choose to boot Linux.

So I've been trying for many minutes to get grub to say something other than "Error 15: File not found" without any success, which makes me sad, because when my new hard drive arrives in a few days, I'm going to re-partition stuff (so I can install gobs of operating systems for learning/fun), and I will no longer have the wonderfulness that is Grub, unless God once again decides to tell my computer how to work for a couple minutes.

So, my question is: does anyone have any idea what's going on? Why would Grub magically work once out of all the times I've done stuff, when I do it the same way every single time? I'm at a total loss.

Anyway, thanks if anyone comes up with anything. I guess I can sit and gaze fondly at my nice, purple gentoo boot menu for a few more days. I guess this is more of a "here is something for you to chew upon" than any sort of urgent question. Grub works now and I've got no real problem with lilo except that I destroy my boot sequence every so often when I recompile the kernel because I forget to rerun lilo.

Cheers.
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pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Weird. menu.lst is pointing to the proper location for your kernel?
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Dolio · l33t Joined: 17 Jun 2002 Posts: 650

Okay, I shouldn't be allowed to post things this late in the night.

I decided to go back and do a:
> root (hd0,6)
> setup (hd0,6)

anyway, just to screw with myself (I also did a > find /boot/vmlinux..., and it worked properly, so maybe I was delirious). It said, as always: