grub

[mike miller]

As Ben suggested I looked through bios and tried changing a few things (one 
at a time) but no perceptable change so it's back to the defaults, where it 
was initially when everything was working.  It gradually got to the point 
where I could only boot into linux, even with super grub disk.  The grub 
menu showed a windows xp title and the entries looked correct and unchanged 
but when selected it would still boot into linux.  My last attempt at fixing 
the mbr with the win xp install disk got a corrupted partition message.  I 
finally broke down and reinstalled win xp successfully.  Of course then fc6 
wouldn't boot.  Attempts to fix that didn't work so I just reinstalled fc6 
(I should have kept track of how many times I've done this.  I'll have to 
check Guiness)  Now it only boots into win xp.  Even super grub disk can't 
make it boot into fc6. I tried installing ubunto 6.06 but that failed while 
trying to reformat sdb, the hard drive that my linux os and data is on. I 
can run Knoppix livecd but otherwise I'm back to a pure win xp machine.

The progression has been from a normally functioning dual booting computer 
to one that would only boot linux and now will only boot win xp.  The 
problems started during a fc6 update but I would have thought that 
reinstalling fc6, including formatting all linux partitions on the hard 
drive would have eliminated that source of trouble.  Could this be a failing 
motherboard?  I'm not getting any consistent error messages.  Should I just 
give up and use this for windows and build another machine for linux? 
Should I just reestablish relations with my slide rule?
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ben Scott" <dragonhawk at gmail.com>
To: "Greater NH Linux User Group" <gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2007 8:48 PM
Subject: Re: grub


> 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
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