grub

Ben Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Wed Oct 10 21:48:16 EDT 2007


On 10/10/07, mike miller <k4ghp at comcast.net> wrote:
> I was dual booting winxp and fc6 until the motherboard died.  I replaced it,
> using the same cpu, memory, hard drives and other peripherals.  I was
> pleasantly surprised to see the grub menu when I first booted but the linux
> default boot failed.

  Most likely, the initrd needed to be updated for the disk controller
on the new motherboard.  Not that that helps you much now.  (inird =
initial ram disk image, which is loaded by GRUB and used by the kernel
to load modules for the driver for the controller for your root disk.)

> On the reboot the screen froze at GRUB. Nothing about stage 2 ...

  That's a tougher nut.  The first stage of GRUB lives in the MBR, and
is responsible only for loading the second stage.  It sounds like the
second stage is failing to load, and that's always hard to diagnose.

  What's really odd is that it used to work, but failed after an
update.  It could be that GRUB was updated, so the updater
re-installed GRUB to the MBR, but that got messed up somehow.  But
running a GRUB fix-it utility should fix that.

  Do you have backups of any data that is on the disk?  If not, make
some before doing anything more.

  Check the motherboard BIOS for options having to do with disk
translation or capacity limiting, and play around to see if they make
GRUB work.

  Check with the motherboard vendor for BIOS updates, and also any
known issues with Linux.  A Google search on the motherboard model
plus "Linux" might also be productive.

> Using the windows xp install disk to fix the mbr didn't help ...

  Now that's *really* odd.  The Microsoft MBR is about as simple as it
gets.  Was your Windows partition set as active?  Were all other
partitions not-active?

-- Ben


More information about the gnhlug-discuss mailing list