Boot weirdnesses

[Jerry Feldman]

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 23:13:11 -0400 (EDT)
bscott at ntisys.com wrote:

>   I encountered a couple of weird problems booting my primary home
>   computer
> today, and I wanted to share.
> 
>   Possibly relevant details:
> 
> - Red Hat Linux 7.3
> - GRUB 0.91-4
> - Epox EP-8K7A+ motherboard (w/ latest BIOS)
> - AHA-2940UW SCSI host adapter (BIOS 2.20)
> - IDE hard disk
> - Multiple SCSI CD/DVD drives

You possibly might have a hardware problem of some sort, and I'll tell
my war story at the end of the post. 
The first thing to check is all the grub files, which I think you did.
The /etc/grub.conf is used when installing grub, but is not used by the
boot process. Here is mine:
--------------
root (hd0,4)
install  --stage2=/boot/grub/stage2 /boot/grub/stage1 d (hd0)
/boot/grub/stage2 0x8000 (hd0,4)/boot/grub/menu.lst
quit
--------------
The critical files are in /boot/grub. Grub installs its stage1 into the
MBR. Upon boot, the stage1 then executes the stage2 which reads
menu.lst, and then proceeds to boot whatever you have in the menu. 
In general I have found GRUB to be very reliable. 


WRT: Hardware. My old laptop was having all sorts of intermittent
problems, the most common was that the DVD drive manufacturer name was
garbled causing Linux not to recognize the drive. The DVD and floppy are
in a separate detachable section, and I was trouble shooting that. I'd
remove it, reseat the cables... Come to find out that the additional
memory I had added somehow went bad. 

The other problem was with my desktop. I had intermittent boot failures.
The hard disks would suddenly go offline causing the system to freeze if
I tried to do anything that used disk (eg. KDE was fine). Sometimes my
system would not reboot after the initial shutdown. I even replaced the
ribbon cables which showed a short term improvement. After living with
this for months, I replaced the power supply and that fixed the problem.
There was no other indication of a bad power supply. 

The bottom line is that when you have wierdnesses like you are having,
start suspecting things like memory, mother board and power supply. The
power supplies are the most prone to failure, and can take other things
with it when it does fail.

I did find a reasonably decent standalone diagnostic disk, the Ultimate
Boot CD:
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/


-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9
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