[ale] All about GRUB

[hscast at charter.net]

---- Richard Kolkovich <sarumont at sigil.org> wrote: 
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> On 07/24/06 12:11, hscast at charter.net declared:
> > :::::Dumb question of the year:::::
> > 
> > Went to fix my grandson's PC who's drive had died. My system had x2 13GB HDs on primary IDE and x2 150GB SATA HDs. I had a partially destroyed SUSE 10.1 on 1st drive and Ubuntu 6.06 on second drive which I kinda screwed up by changing the MBR to the second IDE HD. No problem at the time, until my grandson's hd died. Well grandpa was going to save the day by using his first IDE drive since he really wasn't using it anyway.
> > 
> > Grandson's pc works fine now but my PC no booty, just sits there at blank screen with cursor in upper left corner. I made the physical change  of IDE 1 to IDE 0 and then editted GRUBs menu.lst reflecting that root was now on hd0,0 and the fs is /dev/hda3, but it still does not boot.
> > 
> > I think I need to reinstall GRUB, but not sure if it's necessary. There are Howtos for installing GRUB from floppy, but I do not have such an animal on my PC so are there any HowTos for CDs? Also am I correct in (I don't like to use this word, but...) assuming that GRUB is GRUB or is it unigue to distros?
> > 
> > TIA
> > 
> > Scott Castaline
> > _______________________________________________
> > Ale mailing list
> > Ale at ale.org
> > http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> 
> Do you have a liveCD of sorts?  If not, Gentoo minimal CD will do it
> (small download - all you should need is a shell).  It sounds like you
> just need to install grub to the MBR of the drive if you are getting
> nothing resembling grub at all.
> 
> Upon booting, you will need to mount your installation's main partitions
> (/, /usr, etc.), /dev and (for good measure) /proc.  Chroot to that
> mountpoint.  From here, you can install grub to the MBR in the normal
> fashion.
> 
> Hope this helps.  Let me (us) know if you need any more direction with
> the chrooting, etc.  :)
> 
> - --
> 
> Richard Kolkovich
> sarumont at sigil.org
> 
> 
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I have System Rescue-CD which is supposed to be Gentoo based, mounted all my partitions and then attempted to chroot and then run grub-install hd0 which didn't work and grub-install /dev/hda which also didn't work. I had also downloaded from Ubuntu the alternative iso, burned the pc went into rescue mode and selected to install GRUB on my HDD option. It went through the process of setting up the partition tables and then it started to do a base system install. I aborted that while it was still reading in from CD. I then repeated the first step but using my original Ubuntu Install CD and got the same results. Grub-install kept reporting that the device was not a block device or that it couldn't find /boot/grub. Doing a fdisk -l shows all three of my HDDs and the respective part. tables. I had even made hda1 bootable in fdisk.

Any Ubuntu folks out there that could help? KingBahamut r u out there? I need to get back up asap as I've possibly got a job offer coming up, and need to communicate using my regular PC & not my server or (cough, cough, gag) my wife's M$ box.

I originally had 2 13GB on my primary IDE (hda/hdb)
A DVD and a CD burner on Secondary IDE (hdc/hdd)
2 150GB SATA Drives on seperate SATA cd. (sda/sdb)

I removed what was hda to use to fix my grandson's pc and changed hdb to hda. I made the necessary changes to menu.lst (hd1,0 to hd0,0 as well as reference to /dev/hdb3 to /dev/hda3), as well as device.map is now:

hd0     /dev/hda
hd1     /dev/sda
hd2    /dev/sdb

I do believe that I have to still install grub stage_1 the MBR, but I could be wrong.

TIA

Scott Castaline