Re: address@hidden: Bug#172280: GRUB Read Error]

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

At Mon, 9 Dec 2002 15:51:15 +1100,
Jason Thomas wrote:
> > +properly when booting from a hard disk drive. This often results in a 
> > 'GRUB 
> > +Read Error' during stage1. Therefore, you will have to specify the option 
> > +`<SAMP>d</SAMP>', whether your Stage2 resides at the booting drive or not, 
> > +if you have such a BIOS unfortunately. We know these are defective in that:

This is not very correct. I think 'GRUB Read Error' is a quite lucky
case. Most cases are endless messages such as "GRUB GRUB GRUB..." and
hanging up.

BTW, I prefer fixing the problem completely rather than describing a
workaround. So I sometimes asked those who experienced the problem to
test their BIOSes with my test program (boot loader), but nobody
wanted to be bothered.

Jason, if you see bug reports related to the problem, can you ask the
reporters to test my program? It is available from:

http://www.enbug.org/boottest.tgz

Here is the contents of README:
> This is a boot loader only for testing if your BIOS correctly passes
> boot drive information.
> 
> 1. Save a copy of the MBR of your disk in somewhere safe, such as a
>    removable media.
> 2. Run "sh inst.sh DEVICE" on a Unix shell, where DEVICE is a block device
>    file, such as "/dev/hda". This device should be a drive booted by BIOS.
> 3. Reboot your machine. Then, you should see "boot drive is 0xXX" displayed.
>    If it is not 0x80, perhaps your BIOS is buggy.
> 4. Restore the MBR using a boot floppy or CDROM.

Thanks,
Okuji