Problem booting into that other OS using grub

From: Nicolas Mailhot (Nicolas.Mailhot_at_laPoste.net)
Date: 05/29/04

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    To: fedora-list@redhat.com
    Date: Sat, 29 May 2004 21:46:53 +0200
    
    
    
    

    Hi,

            Some time ago (around march) I had a hardware problem (basically me not
    being careful enough during component replacement) that corrupted data
    on all my hard drives.

            As a result I reinstalled from scratch my linux system. Today I decided
    to reinstall the other OS that lives on an old 12 GiB disk (comes handy
    every few months to check a oo.o pdf can be read by acrobat reader). To
    simplify things I went in the bios, put the drive in lba mode, told the
    bios to boot from it, scratched all existing partitions and let the OS
    create a new partition spanning all the drive. So far so good.

            After loosing massive amounts of time getting everything to a current
    patchlevel I told the bios to resume booting on the "SCSI" card (the
    additional ide card on which the linux raid is). It booted in grub all
    right, and I selected other OS in the menu (I had restored my pre-crash
    grub.conf by then). Black screen, no activity.

            The grub entry is a simple :

    title Other
            map (hd2) (hd0)
            rootnoverify (hd2,0)
            chainloader +1

    (and I think the map part is largely irrelevant since the latest version
    of the other OS enumerates disks like linux and grub now)

    I've tried to change the grub entry a little without getting anything
    but a hang (sometimes the grub commands stays displayed,
    sometimes the screen is blank). I've tried with FC1 and FC2 versions of
    grub. I'm stuck.

    So I'm suspecting there is a partitionning problem now.

    Fdisk says :

    The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 1650.
    There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
    and could in certain setups cause problems with:
    1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
    2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
       (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

    Disk /dev/hde: 13.5 GB, 13578485760 bytes
    255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1650 cylinders
    Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
     
       Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
    /dev/hde1 * 1 1649 13245561 7 HPFS/NTFS

    Parted says :

    Using /dev/hde
    Warning: Unable to align partition properly. This probably means that
    another
    partitioning tool generated an incorrect partition table, because it
    didn't havethe correct BIOS geometry. It is safe to ignore,but ignoring
    may cause
    (fixable) problems with some boot loaders.
    Ignore/Cancel? i
    (parted) p
    Disk geometry for /dev/hde: 0.000-12949.453 megabytes
    Disk label type: msdos
    Minor Start End Type Filesystem Flags
    1 0.031 12935.148 primary ntfs boot

    What I'm interested is the fixable part of the parted message. Both the
    Linux and the other OS installations are sane, changing the boot order
    in the bios always work. It's not too practical however (going into the
    bios for this is a great way to nuke a system by fooling with other
    options). So I'd like to get grub working as it used to.

    Am I doing an obvious mistake ?

    Is this a grub bug ? Should it be bugzillaed ?

    -- 
    Nicolas Mailhot
    
    

    
    

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  • Next message: Scot L. Harris: "Re: using libmilter, milter-spamc and spamassasin"

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