Re: Suse 9.1 Pro fails to boot

On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 04:48:15 GMT, Charlie Smith
<csmith001@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Woohoo - I made SOME progress tonight!

I managed to get the install cd to boot in the target machine.
Turns out the admin (that's me) made a big goof when he connected
the cd reader and cd writer. Removed the original reader from the
system and am now able to boot from cd again. Yeah!

Second problem - not able to boot from hard drive. Kind of got this
one fixed.

Once I booted from the install cd, I went thru the repair installed
system - the whole nine yards. It found a couple of minor problems
in filesystem and udev so I let it correct those.

Then it got to the bootloader section and I let it generate a new
grub menu.lst file. I took out the cd and tried to boot from the
drive. No go - still goes straight to the grub shell.

I checked all the files in my boot partition and everything looked
okay (permissions and links). So I tried entering the kernel and
initrd lines from menu.lst and it booted just fine.

My question now is why isn't grub able to read the menu.lst file
and present the menu like it supposed to?

BTW, I also ran fdisk -l to get the partition layout on the disk.

/dev/hda1 - swap
/dev/hda2 - root

Yep, that's it. /boot is in /dev/hda2 and grub is a subdirectory
of /boot.

Any ideas why grub can't or won't read it's menu.lst file?


Run grub and set the MBR to point to hda2
grub> root (hd0,1) #sets grub root to hda2
> setup (hd0) #write grub config to MBR of hda
> quit

For booting a kernel in hda2 (/boot) your grub stanza in menu.lst
should resemble this: (assuming you have initrd and vmlinuz linked to
the correct images)

:title SUSE Linux
: root (hd0,1)
: kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2 othercrap....
: initrd /initrd


Also, some grubs look for "grub.conf" instead of "menu.lst" in the
/boot/grub directory. You could try linking or copying menu.lst to
grub.conf

--
alistair
.

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