new Etch install fails to boot

Hi,

Sometimes older bios has a virus protection enabled in the bios itself.
This does not allow anything to be written to the MBR to protect MBR
viruses. I have faced this problem whereby the MBR gets cooked and the
GRUB does not get written properly. Looking at your information it
looks like grub is not able to proceed. Can you check your bios once
again and try disabling the virus protection (re-enable it later once
things are working) and re-install the grub and check ?

On Sun, 2007-07-29 at 17:43 -0400, Steve Kleene wrote:
> I just made a fresh Etch Netinst CD and successfully completed an install on
> a PC that I bought six years ago. When I try to boot, this is as far as it
> gets:
>
> Verifying DMI Pool Data ..........
> GRUB Loading stage1.5.
> Read
>
> It may or may not be relevant to mention an issue I had in the past with this
> box. I used to run Red Hat on it but with a Windows partition at the start
> of the disk. During the Red Hat installation, I had to select "Force LBA32"
> or it wouldn't find the Linux boot partition.
>
> Now, though, I have given the whole disk to Etch, so I'd be surprised if this
> is the issue. There are just two partitions:
>
> IDE5 master (hde) - 41.2 GB IC35L040AVER07-0
> #1 primary 39.9 GB B f ext3 /
> #5 logical 1.5 GB f swap swap
>
> The BIOS (AWARD 1998 / PCI/PNP 686 / 276079428) shows:
> IDE Primary Master Auto (other choices are None, Manual)
> Access Mode Auto (other choices are Normal, LBA, Large)
>
> I've tried various combinations, including LBA, to no avail. The hard drives
> are IBM Deskstar 40-GB IDE hard drives, model IC35L040AVER07-0.
>
> Any ideas how to fix this? Thanks.
>
>
--
Bhasker C V
Registered Linux user: #306349 (counter.li.org)
The box said "Requires Windows 95, NT, or better", so I installed Linux.

--

On Sun, Jul 29, 2007 at 11:00:30PM -0400, Steve Kleene wrote:
> [I wrote that my fresh Etch install calls grub and then stops.]

What happens if you reboot the installer in rescue mode and tell it to
install grub again?

Does the box have a floppy and do you have a grub-disk (I've never made
a grub-stick)? Will that get you to a grub command line?

Doug.

--

On Sun, Jul 29, 2007 at 10:28:04PM -0500, Mumia W.. wrote:

> If you can, try to get the boot files placed before the 1024th cylinder
> boundary. Sometimes this is at 0.5GB, 2.1GB or 8GB. Try a partition
> layout like so:
>
> /boot (primary #1, 2.1GB)
> / (primary #2, 37.8GB)
> swap (logical #5, 1.5GB)
>

You shouldn't need a 2.1GB /boot. I find that 24 MB is fine. Hey,
splurge and make it 32 MB.

Since we don't know what the problem is, better be safe and assume that
the boundary is as 512 MB.

Doug.

--

On Mon, Jul 30, 2007 at 08:24:08AM -0400, Steve Kleene wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 29, 2007 at 11:00:30PM -0400, Steve Kleene wrote:
> > [I wrote that my fresh Etch install calls grub and then stops.]
>
> On Sun, 29 Jul 2007 23:19:40 -0400, From: Douglas Allan Tutty replied:
> > What happens if you reboot the installer in rescue mode and tell it to
> > install grub again?
>
> I don't know how to do this yet, but it sounds like it's worth looking into.
> I'm hoping not to have to run the whole build again.
>

The installer's rescue mode (at the boot prompt, instead of typing
'install', just type 'rescue') is designed to rescue an already
installed system. It will not reinstall from rescue mode. I also gives
you the option of a shell chrooted into your installation where you can
run commands as if it had booted normally.

> > Does the box have a floppy and do you have a grub-disk (I've never made
> > a grub-stick)? Will that get you to a grub command line?
>
> It does have a floppy. I do not have a grub-disk. I do have a second
> (newer) box that is happily running Etch.
>

Then on that box, install the grub-disk package. It gives you a disk
image which you write to a floppy with dd:
dd if=grub-disk.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024 conv=sync; sync

If that box has grub installed and you have the grub-doc package, there
are instructions for putting grub onto a floppy from within the grub
command line.

> And on Sun, 29 Jul 2007 22:28:04 -0500, "Mumia W.." wrote:
>
> > If you can, try to get the boot files placed before the 1024th cylinder
> > boundary. Sometimes this is at 0.5GB, 2.1GB or 8GB. Try a partition
> > layout like so ...
>
> This is exactly what I always did with Red Hat and lilo on a drive that
> shared Windows and Linux. I could easily try this again but thought it
> should be unnecessary for two reasons. First, I am using grub now, which I
> thought supported lba by default. Second, without the whole drive allocated
> to Etch (i.e. no Windows partition at the start of the drive), I imagined the
> files needed by grub would not be placed past cylinder 1024. But maybe
> that's unpredictable.

Just because grub can find something doesn't mean that your bios can
boot it. Just to save the headache later, especially if I move the
drive from one computer to another, I _always_ put /boot in the first
partition on its own. If I have two drives, I'll put it on a raid1
partition for good measure.

Doug.

--

On Sun, 29 Jul 2007 17:43:26 -0400
Steve Kleene wrote:

Hello Steve,

> I just made a fresh Etch Netinst CD and successfully completed an
> install on a PC that I bought six years ago. When I try to boot,
> this is as far as it gets:

Have you tried booting with a noapic option? Older machines sometime
require that; Mine does, and it's a similar age to yours.

--
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/ ) "The blindingly obvious is
/ _)rad never immediately apparent"

Black man got a lot of problems, but he don't mind throwing a brick
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