grub

[mike miller]

So now I've got a windows only machine with an unused second hard drive that 
used to be formatted for linux.  Windows doesn't even see it. I thought I'd 
try to use a linux boot disk to format it but decided to stick it in my 
second dvd drive instead of the one that I had been using. It seemed to run 
ok so I just let it go through the whole installation again. (define crazy) 
Now everything works.  The grub menu comes up just like it used to and boots 
both into win xp and fc6.  I'm even getting the message about 262 updates 
again but I think that I'll ignore that for a while.  I have no idea why 
it's working now or if it will still be working tomorrow.

Mike Miller
----- 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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