Re: GRand Unified Boot misery and Fedora Core 4

• Previous message: Peter T. Breuer: "Re: mouse scroll not working in 2.6 kernel"
• In reply to: anoneds_at_netscape.net: "Re: GRand Unified Boot misery and Fedora Core 4"
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Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 09:19:05 GMT

On Tue, 22 Nov 2005 06:20:19 -0800, anoneds wrote:

> You are a pompous ass,

If you say so.

> you really should go back to your salesman job.
> It fits you.

Never left it.
 
> And grub sucks. Sure it works for millions (really, millions?) of
> people, but then so does Windows, would you argue that Windows is
> better than Linux simply because there are more people who got it to
> work?
>
> I say that having been a systems admin for 5 years, and an operator for
> 10 years, and tech support for another 5 years. Salesman for only two
> weeks.

It's amazing that, with that background, you can't get your Win98SE to
boot, and don't have a clue why not. My two copies of Win98SE, as well as
my two copies of Win2K, all on this machine along with seven Linux
distros, boot just fine. Maybe you should have stuck with sales.
 
> grub sucks. Even the documentation is unclear as to whether grub
> resides in /boot/grub or /boot/boot/grub.

If you have your boot partition mounted on /boot, it resides in
/boot/grub. If you don't mount your boot partition, which I don't, then
grub simply sees it as (hd0,1) /grub.

Grub isn't your problem, Win98SE is. Put your Win98SE CD back in your
CD-ROM, run fdisk, and this time when it asks if you want to enable large
disk support, enter "yes". Then exit fdisk. Do fdisk /mbr again, and try
to reboot. You already installed Win98SE with large disk support, (fat32)
and when you told it later to not enable large disk support you confused
it into looking for a fat16 partition, or worse yet, to possibly try to
write a 16 bit fat on a 32 bit formatted partition, thus the "invalid
media" error. Whether Win98SE can un confuse itself, or undo whatever it
did to itself, we'll know after you do the above. If it doesn't reboot,
run scandisk on C:. Try sys C: again, to see if you still get the "invalid
media" error. If you don't get the "invalid media" error, try
rebooting to windows. If it still doesn't boot, rerun setup.exe yet again,
and it should work.

If it still reports "invalid media" prepare to reformat, and reinstall
Win98SE from scratch. Get what you can off of the disk with Fedora, and
burn it to CDs.

I know, cdrecord doesn't recognize the burner. As stated in the other
thread, get rid of the "hdd=ide-scsi" in your Fedora boot stanza, reboot,
then run;

  $ cdrecord -scanbus dev=ATA

It should find your burner and give an output something like;

[imotgm@fatman imotgm]$ cdrecord -scanbus dev=ATA
Cdrecord-Clone 2.01-dvd (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2004 Jörg Schilling
Note: This version is an unofficial (modified) version with DVD support
Note: and therefore may have bugs that are not present in the original.
Note: Please send bug reports or support requests to <warly@mandrakesoft.com>.
Note: The author of cdrecord should not be bothered with problems in this version.
scsidev: 'ATA'
devname: 'ATA'
scsibus: -2 target: -2 lun: -2
#########################################################################################
#
# Warning: Using ATAPI via /dev/hd* interface. Use dev=ATA:X,Y,Z or dev=/dev/hdX
#
#########################################################################################
Linux sg driver version: 3.5.27
Using libscg version 'schily-0.8'.
cdrecord: Warning: using inofficial libscg transport code version (warly-Mandrakelinux-scsi-linux-sg '@(#)scsi-linux-sg.c 1.83 04/05/20 Copyright 1997 J. Schilling').
scsibus0:
        0,0,0 0) *
        0,1,0 1) 'PIONEER ' 'DVD-RW DVR-108 ' '1.10' Removable CD-ROM
        0,2,0 2) *
        0,3,0 3) *
        0,4,0 4) *
        0,5,0 5) *
        0,6,0 6) *
        0,7,0 7) *
[imotgm@fatman imotgm]$

Once cdrecord knows where the burner is, you can run cdrecord, from the
CLI, or k3b from KDE, or whatever, from Gnome or whichever wm you prefer.

On a totally different note, if you get another hard drive, as you
mentioned in the other thread, and you feel adventurous, put it into the
machine as /dev/hda (master on the first IDE controller) leaving your
original disk out of the machine. Partition it as if you were going to
install Windows, and Fedora, just like the original disk, allowing for any
differences in size. Install Windows on the first partition, along with
all your apps and drivers etc. Remove the new drive, change the jumper to
slave, and reinstall the old drive as master and the new drive as slave on
the first IDE controller. Reinstall grub on /dev/hda and in
/boot/grub/menu.conf add the stanza;

title Windows -new
    root (hd1,0)
    map (hd1) (hd0)
    map (hd0) (hd1)
    makeactive
    chainloader +1

Reboot, and choose Windows -new and your new Windows installation will
boot, and your old installation should show up as drive D:. Find your data
on D: and see if the files will open with the appropriate apps on the new
C:. Whatever opens, save to C:. Whatever does not open is corrupt, and
probably un savable. If you can transfer any more of your old data, do so.

When you've saved all that you can, reformat the old Windows partition as
either ext3 or vfat, depending on which you have more need of. You
can remove the old Windows stanza from /boot/grub/menu.conf, if you
wish, or leave it, if you plan on copying /dev/hda2 to /dev/hdb2, and you
can run like that without the danger of Windows ever rewriting the MBR on
your now Linux only disk. Any repair to Windows will only rewrite the MBR
of the disk that it is installed on.

I've run like this for years, run setup.exe on Win98SE, and winnt32.exe
(the equivalent of setup.exe for Win2K) numerous times, and never had to
reinstall grub. If your Linux drive fails, completely, you can still move
the Windows drive back to the Master position (remembering to change the
jumper) and it will boot normally, as it does not have grub in it's MBR.

Should the Linux disk prove to be shaky, before it fails, you can copy
Fedora to the new drive, if you want the same setup as you now have, or
you can copy it to yet another new drive, and install it as master, to
keep the two systems completely separate, as in the newer configuration.

You can, also, copy Fedora / to /dev/hdb3, create a mount point
/mnt/Fedora2, mount /dev/hdb3 on /mnt/Fedora2, and change /dev/hda3 to
/dev/hdb3 in /mnt/Fedora2/etc/fstab (you need to be root to do this) so it
reads;

/dev/hdb3 / ext3 defaults 1 1

then save it as fstab, and also fstab2

Add a stanza for Fedora2 in /boot/grub/menu.conf by copying the existing
Fedora stanza, and changing the root=/dev/hda3 to root=/dev/hdb3 and
the "title Fedora2" you now have a bootable backup of your working Fedora
installation. You can use rsync to keep the two the same, but each time
you run rsync you'll have to exclude /etc/fstab, or open fstab2 and save
it as fstab, before booting to Fedora2.

Now if you muck up something in your working Fedora, and it becomes
unbootable, just reboot to Fedora2, mount Fedora someplace, and delete
whatever you mucked up in Fedora, use "cp -a" to replace it with it's
identical (before the muck up) clone, and reboot.

If you also copy /dev/hda2 (your boot partition) to /dev/hdb2, and have a
swap partition on the new drive, in the event of a total failure of drive
hda, you only have to move the new drive to master, change the single
/dev/hdb3 reference in fstab to /dev/hda3, which you can do with a
knoppix, or similar, disk, and install grub to the MBR, and you're back in
business with only a few minutes delay.

> Oh, bloody hell, I'd rather run a VMS system! Give me bootstrings!

I'd rather chase women. Give me boobies!! ;-)

-- 
imotgm   
       "Lost? Lost? I've never been lost... Been a tad confused for a
        month or two, but never lost."

• Previous message: Peter T. Breuer: "Re: mouse scroll not working in 2.6 kernel"
• In reply to: anoneds_at_netscape.net: "Re: GRand Unified Boot misery and Fedora Core 4"
• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]