Re: [SLE] grub refuses to grub

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• In reply to: Don W. Jenkins: "[SLE] grub refuses to grub"
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To: suse-linux-e@suse.com
Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 16:13:11 +0000

On Sunday 14 November 2004 3:37 am, Don W. Jenkins wrote:
> I managed to solve a lingering problem I've had with my freezing display
> after narrowing it pretty much to a hardware problem in the mother
> board. I had a new ASUS P4S800 sitting around that I wasn't using, so I
> swapped it in today, so I have that and a Celeron 2.4 gig, 512mb of
> memory, Nvidia FX 5200 video card, Proxim Orinoco wifi card, a 30 gig HD
> for Windows and 60 gig HD for Linux, a regular CDROM and a CDRW. I was
> pleased to find that everything booted, got detected and worked the
> first time, and there appears to be no problem with the display now. It
> was freezing in everything, including Windows, gradually worsening.

So, to this point you are happy that everything is now working. So what do you
actually have working? Hardware? Microsoft Operating Sytem? Linux?

> But
> what I can't do any more is get Grub to boot the machine. No matter
> which distro I try to install and have install Grub, when I try the
> reboot, I get an "error 25" whatever that is, and the boot process just
> stops. For some reason Grub isn't able to pass off to the second HD
> where the actual boot sector is, and I gather, where the actual Grub
> menu is to select Windows.

Have you ever had this working? Let's try and be really clear about:
1] What does work
2] What does not work
3] Whether 2] is stuff which has never worked, or stuff which once worked, but
has ceased working
4] What you did to stop it working if it used to work.

> To complicate things, I cannot get Linux to
> rewrite my MBR, because I have Win2000 Server installed, which uses
> NTFS, which does not allow write permission from Linux.

MBR's are not part of a file system, so they can be rewritten from Linux at
will. [as an aside, how are you running Linux?]

> And I don't
> recall, or never knew how to rewrite the MBR from fdisk on a Windows
> boot disk. I've even tried to get Win 2000 to reinstall, but it is
> doing funky things at the point where it is supposed to reboot and
> continue the install. It just keeps going around again if the CD is in
> the ROM, and if it is out, Grub is still in the way. It hasn't
> rewritten the MBR yet. If I try the Linux boot floppy, it hangs at the
> point where it would hand off to the boot sector on the second HD, also.

Sounds like a right tangle. I would take out the 2nd HD, make sure the first
is master on the primary IDE and check all BIOS settings, then check that I
could boot that drive, if there is anything on it, or install a working linux
or microsoft operating system if there is nothing.

Only then would I put the second HD back. And I would have a good read of the
SUSE manual to understand partitioning, booting and GRUB, before deciding how
to proceed. Do make sure you understand that Hard Drives do not have windows
drive letters c: d: etc, it is partitions which have drive letters - the HD's
only appear to have letters when you put a windows partition on the whole
drive.

GRUB gives you the option to install its boot record as the MBR for a disk as
a whole [eg /dev/hda] or for a partition [/dev/hda1]. The distinction is
important, because these 2 places are NOT the same, even if you have used a
whole HD as a single partition. [IOW, 'not partitioning' does not really make
anything simpler, it just obscures the fact that you have actually
partitioned and allows you to remain confused about partitioning, without
changing any of the things you are confused about, which caused you to 'not
partition'.]

>
> Does this ring any bells? I'm probably going to have to wipe the
> Windows partition and do a clean install, and maybe the same for the
> Linux side. Or since I have a Win XP laptop, I may just make this a
> Linux machine and forget the dual boot.

The last idea sounds good, it is more usual to threaten to give Linux the chop
if there is a failure to acheive cohabitation.

hth

Vince Littler

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• Previous message: Paul Howie: "[SLE] Detatchable menus"
• In reply to: Don W. Jenkins: "[SLE] grub refuses to grub"
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