Re: Request for help debugging this grub problem

[Yedidyah Bar-David]

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.
> 
> 
> 
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