[ale] Can no longer boot one of my drives - SOLVED

[Geoffrey]

Trey Sizemore wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Dec 2007 10:17:03 -0500
> Jim Lynch <ale_nospam at fayettedigital.com> wrote:
> 
>> Trey Sizemore wrote:
>>> Hi all-
>>>
>>> I'm hoping someone can help with the issue I'm having.  Here's a
>>> quick rundown of the situation:
>>>
>>> Desktop machine with 2 500GB SATA drives.  One drive has both
>>> Windows VISTA (1st partition) and Fedora 7 (sda2 is / and sda3
>>> is /home)
>>>
>>> Second drive only has only openSUSE 10.3 (sdb1 is /, sdb2 is swap,
>>> sdb3 is /tmp and the rest is an LVM with HOME, OPT, USR, and VAR)
>>>
>>> I use GAG (boot loader) to boot and have entries for all 3 operating
>>> systems.  I have been using this setup successfully for quite a
>>> while now.
>>>
>>> I was most recently in openSUSE and shut down the machine Monday
>>> morning to go out of town.  When I came back last night, I could
>>> boot into either Vista or Fedora, but not openSUSE.  Trying to do
>>> so gives the error: "Sector boot not found or invalid".  
>>>
>>> I went into the "add an OS" setup to look at how the drives were
>>> being seen.  It looks like:
>>> Drive 1
>>> A Boot from floppy
>>> B 07h NTFS/Windows
>>> C 83h Linux EXT2
>>> D 83h Linux EXT2
>>>
>>> Drive2
>>> A Boot from floppy
>>> B 76h
>>>
>>> That's it for Drive2.
>>>
>>> I suppose it could be a bad drive, but I've not seen anything with
>>> the drive prior to this to suggest that.  The cabling looks good
>>> between the drive and motherboard.  Any ideas here as to how to go
>>> about troubleshooting and hopefully getting this drive back?
>>>
>>> Let me know if any more info is required, and thanks for any and all
>>> help!
>>>   
>> First thing I'd do is boot Fedora and  run fdisk -l as SU to see what 
>> the partition tables look like.
>> Then try to mount the partitions from SDB.  If they all mount, then
>> run fsck on them after a umount.  If they are OK, the problem is with
>> the boot  but I don't know anything about GAG so I can't help there.
>> Jim.
> 
> 
> Thanks to all who replied.  I re-installed grub on the MBR after
> booting into openSUSE using the installation media.  When I rebooted, I
> was met with a error 21 grub message.
> 
> Long story short and after some googling, some people were receiving
> this error (disk not found) when having a USB drive plugged in at the
> time of boot.  Sure enough, I had an iPod shuffle plugged in.
> Unplugging it and rebooting allowed grub to come up fully.
> 
> Still not quite sure why this causes a problem, but that was it.

Is it possible that the OS is seeing the ipod as your second drive 
rather then your REAL second drive?  That would make sense out of the 
error message that it couldn't find a bootable partition.

> 
> Thanks again all.
> 


-- 
Until later, Geoffrey

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
  - Benjamin Franklin