Subject: installation-reports: GRUB hang with infinite beep after Reboot Followup-For: Bug #283950 Package: installation-reports Version: sarge_d-i/i386/rc2
*** Please type your report below this line *** GRUB hung at first boot after install, showing "GRUB _" on the screen at lower left corner (here the '_' means the blinking cursor in column 6) and beeping a continuous tone (infinitely many '^G' with no sound gap).
I downloaded the 2004-12-16 edition of http://cdimage.debian.org/pub/cdimage-testing/sarge_d-i/i386/rc2/sarge-i386-netinst.iso to install sarge onto an existing multiboot box, with sarge root in newly-formatted 6GB ext3 hda7, with a separate /boot partition in existing 150MB ext3 hda1 [with GRUB existing in MBR], and an existing 1GB swap on hda6. I used manual partitioning to select the correct filesystems. I chose to have the installer put GRUB on hda7 because I feared that my existing hda(0,0)/grub/grub.conf [with GRUB in MBR] would be wiped out.
After apparently successful install, reboot brought up the Debian GRUB boot screen, now with twice as many choices as before the install: each old multibooting kernel now also had a "(recovery mode)" choice that merely appended " single" to the kernel command line. Choosing the default Debian 1st line [sarge in normal mode] hung as described above. The kernel commandline parameters from my old grub.conf were not forwarded to the new /boot/grub/menu.lst.
I used rescue mode of Fedora Core 3 DVD to re-install GRUB on MBR, then rebooted the installer and tried installing Debian sarge again. This time I did not tell the installer about /boot on hda1, but still asked for GRUB in hda7. Both Install and reboot succeeded, using the Debian GRUB in hda7. I think that the Debian GRUB splash screen is ugly, and I don't want the "(recovery mode)" choices for all my other multibooted systems [I know how to use the GRUB editor to boot into single-user mode on demand], so I put GRUB back in MBR and forwarded the vmlinuz and initrd files by hand from Debian /boot directory to my hda1 /boot partition. Final result: succesful installation on second try, taking advantage of expert user knowledge to bypass failure of installer to setup GRUB correctly in an uncommon situation.
-- System Information: Debian Release: 3.1 APT prefers testing APT policy: (500, 'testing') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.4.27-1-386 Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
-- John Reiser, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
