Re: Request for help debugging this grub problem

[Yedidyah Bar-David]

I know it's ugly to reply to myself, but anyway, just a small note -
adding an entry to grub (or otherwise changing its conf) doesn't
require reinstalling it, unlike lilo. 'make install' in the kernel
runs /sbin/installkernel, which in RH eventually runs a program
named grubby, which has no manpage, and which probably reinstalls
grub (unnecessarily). If you consider this a bug, you can report
it to RedHat. If you ran grub-install yourself (before trying to
reboot to what 'make install' did), it's your bug :-(

Good luck,
-- 
Didi

On Sun, Sep 28, 2003 at 12:25:43AM +0300, Yedidyah Bar-David wrote:
> Hello Jon,
> 
> Your problem isn't with grub, but with ntldr. Can you please post your
> boot.ini? I guess the relevant line is something like this:
> c:\somefile="GRUB"
> where somefile is a copy of the first sector of /dev/hda3.
> I really can't imagine this happening without your intervention, so
> either you forgot you did it or someone did it for you.
> How to solve it?
> 1. The ugly way - copy again your first sector to a file. This is
> ugly because if your NT is on NTFS you will have to copy this
> sector to a floppy (or some other FAT partition, network etc.),
> reboot to NT, and copy it back over somefile.
> 2. The good way - simply install grub on /dev/hda (the MBR) and add
> an entry for NT
> (something like
> title Windows XP
> rootnoverify (hd0,0)
> chainloader +1
> boot).
> -- 
> Didi
> 
> On Sat, Sep 27, 2003 at 11:48:58PM +1000, Jon Seymour wrote:
> > I have had grub installed on my RedHat 8 system for sometime now. It had 
> > been working fine.
> > 
> > Just recently, I needed to compile a later kernel (2.4.21) to take 
> > advantage of some additional functionality.
> > 
> > make install on the kernel updated my grub configuration, but I can no 
> > longer boot from the hard disk.
> > 
> > The symptom is a console with the following message:
> > 
> > GRUB<space>
> > 
> > To explain my setup:
> > 
> >    * the MBR of hd0 boots into Windows XP on /dev/hda1 [ kept around so 
> > that I can use partition magic ]
> >    * boot.ini of Windows XP has been configured with one item for 
> > Windows XP and one for /dev/hda3
> >    * the Linux root file system is on /dev/hda5 (hd0,4)
> >    * the boot file system is on /dev/hda3 (hd0,2) and is mounted over 
> > /boot when /dev/hda5 is the root fs.
> >    * /dev/hda3 and /dev/hda5 are ext2 partitions
> >   
> > I tried re-installing grub with:
> > 
> >    grub-install /dev/hda3
> > 
> > I also tried:
> > 
> >    grub-install --root-directory=/boot /dev/hda3
> > 
> > but neither option helped.
> > 
> > So, I booted off a linux recovery disk and tried installing grub on a 
> > new floppy disk with:
> > 
> >    grub-install /dev/fd0
> > 
> > I copied grub.conf from (hd0,2)/grub/grub.conf on (fd0)/boot/grub.
> > 
> > When I boot from this floppy disk, this works as expected - a grub menu 
> > appears and I can select the OS image I want to boot from the grub menu.
> > 
> > Having tried everything I could think off to get the harddisk booting, I 
> > resorted to using xxd to edit the stage1 file in /usr/share/grub so that 
> > byte0x17c was 'g' rather than 'G'. This is the first letter of the first 
> > message that "GRUB" writes to the console when the boot record is 
> > executed. I then did a grub-install /dev/fd0 and confirmed that the boot 
> > message was gRUB rather than GRUB. However, if then I did a grub-install 
> > /dev/hda3 and then tried to boot the boot message was GRUB rather than 
> > the expected "gRUB". This seems to indicate to me that the stage1 file 
> > it is executing isn't the one that gets installed by grub-install 
> > (otherwise the message should read gRUB).
> > 
> > I am not sure if it is relevant, but here is a copy of the partition 
> > table (captured with sfdisk). fdisk reports that the partition table is 
> > "out of order". I haven't tried an reordering the partition table yet 
> > because I am afraid of the consequences of doing so.
> > 
> > Disk /dev/hda: 4998 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
> > Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0
> > 
> >   Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System
> > /dev/hda1   *      0+    764     765-   6144831    7  HPFS/NTFS
> > /dev/hda2       4735    4997     263    2112547+  1c  Hidden Win95 FAT32 
> > (LBA)
> > /dev/hda3        765     777      13     104422+  83  Linux
> > /dev/hda4        778    4734    3957   31784602+   f  Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
> > /dev/hda5        778+   4591    3814-  30635923+  83  Linux
> > /dev/hda6       4592+   4721     130-   1044193+  82  Linux swap
> >                start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,1,1)
> > /dev/hda7       4722+   4734      13-    104391    b  Win95 FAT32
> >                start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,1,1)
> > 
> > For the record, here is my grub.conf file located in 
> > /boot/grub/grub.conf (hd0,2)/grub/grub.conf
> > 
> > # grub.conf generated by anaconda
> > #
> > # Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
> > # NOTICE:  You have a /boot partition.  This means that
> > #          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
> > #          root (hd0,2)
> > #          kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda5
> > #          initrd /initrd-version.img
> > # boot=/dev/hda3
> > default=0
> > timeout=10
> > splashimage=(hd0,2)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
> > title Red Hat Linux (2.4.18-14)
> >        root (hd0,2)
> >        kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.18-14 ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi
> >        initrd /initrd-2.4.18-14.img
> > title DOS
> >        rootnoverify (hd0,0)
> >        chainloader +1
> > 
> > 
> > Any thoughts about why grub has started misbehaving for me?
> > 
> > jon.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Bug-grub mailing list
> > address@hidden
> > http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-grub
> 
> 
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