Re: GRUB won't boot Suse 8.2 (fresh install)

From: NoSpam (nobody_at_nowhere.com)
Date: 08/03/03 

Date: Sat, 02 Aug 2003 18:22:23 -0500

On Sat, 02 Aug 2003 19:59:22 +0100, Ian Northeast
<ian@house-from-hell.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>NoSpam wrote:
>>
>> I just installed Suse 8.2 and now when it boots, the screen just
>> says
>>
>> GRUB _
>>
>> with a flashing cursor. I can't type anything, it won't go on,
>> nothing. Any ideas?
>
>Give more details about your setup, what your hardware is, what disks
>you have, how they are partitioned, whether any other OS is present, and
>anything else you can think of which may be "unusual".
>
>BTW the last time I saw this a colleague (co-worker) had added a new
>disk to an existing WinXP system and installed SuSE on it. He hadn't
>gone into the BIOS to tell it to notice it had a new disk, so the BIOS
>refused to access it. Just going into the BIOS's hard disks menu and
>telling it to look sorted it. This does not mean that this is your
>problem - without any information it's impossible to guess.
>
>In a case like this it can sometimes help to replace grub with LILO
>temporarily. LILO is more verbose with BIOS error messages. This is how
>I diagnosed the one I mentioned. See
>http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/fhassel_grub_lilo.html, although as this
>refers explicitly to 8.1 it may not be totally correct.
>
>Regards, Ian

I actually tried LILO and it wasn't real descriptive either. When it
tried to boot, it printed out the number "99" a whole lot of times,
then locked up.

I also tried Suse 8.1 on this machine a while back and had the same
probelm with GRUB. With that one, I was able to boot from floppies to
get far enough to load the installer over the network off another
machine and somehow get it to boot from there.

I think the problem might be the BIOS, which is too old to cope with
drives bigger than 8Gig. And there's no upgrade available, I've
checked. I have a 30Gig drive in it (smallest I could find) and the
BIOS says it's 8Gig. I've partitioned it so that there's a small boot
partition, a swap partition and about 7Gig for root. The rest is just
going to waste and isn't even formatted or mounted.

No other OS installed.

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