Allen,
I also installed Debian Woody, and then Sarge, for the first time a couple weeks ago.
I've had some of the hassles as you. In truth, I think I would have abandoned the
distro if I hadn't read so many positive reviews from people I respect. I miss the
familiar comfort of rpm and up2date, and have not had good experiences with dpkg,
apt-get, and dselect. Maybe I'll get the hang of it.
Regarding your Grub trouble. Are you using a config file (menulst, or grub.conf)?
-----------------------
Sample grub.conf
-----------------------
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Fedora Core (2.6.8-1.521)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.8-1.521 ro root=LABEL=/
initrd /initrd-2.6.8-1.521.img
-----------------------
I didn't see that you communicated how you are choosing between your various
installations. I ask because my past grub stumbles have involved:
a. not declaring the correct root drive
b. not declaring the kernel path correctly relative to root
c. not having a correct initrd with the correct modules and fstab
The config file offers the opportunity to get any of these right or wrong.
- rob
On Fri, Nov 05, 2004 at 05:04:34PM -0800, Allen Brown wrote:
> I need assistance.
>
> I have fixed a lot of problems with my Debian Sarge installation.
> In a few cases I have resorted to asking of the linux mailing lists.
> Fortunately in most cases I could figure them out on my own.
> I still have a list of things that are not-quite-right. Most
> I will simply ignore. But there is one which is causing significant
> trouble. Grub.
>
> I have a several existing installations on my computer. And I've
> been using grub for years with good results. So when an install
> wants to overwrite my grub info I generally divert it to some
> harmless place so that I can analyze what it did and incorporate
> that into my existing grub configuration. That has worked well.
>
> When I got to the grub step in the Sarge install I told it to
> write the loader to a floppy. The floppy works. I can boot
> into Debian as long as the floppy is in the drive. And since
> I didn't mount the /boot partition during the install, it wrote
> the Debian specific configuration to its own directory.
>
> If I remove the floppy I am back to my old grub menu (controlled
> by the /boot partition which I have mounted). So far so good.
>
> Now I merge the new grub entries into the /boot. Hmm. Something
> odd here. The format has some new features. Study the manual.
> Aha! This is a new grub family from Gnu. OK. Works mostly the
> same. So I add the relevant parts to the old /boot and reboot
> without the floppy. Mind you, since I haven't written a new copy
> of the grub bootloader to my hard drive I am still using the old
> bits to boot.
>
> Booting into RedHat7.3 works fine.
> Booting into Debian Sarge fails! The entry is there but the
> kernel panics saying there is something wrong with the root
> partition /dev/hda15.
>
> That's odd. Boot from the floppy. Works fine even tho it
> is booting to the same kernel and same root partition.
>
> So I follow the grub instructions to install the bootloader to
> a second and third floppy. In both cases the bootloader fails
> in the stage2 of the loader. I never get to the prompt.
> What the heck is going wrong? It's like the new images use
> instructions that don't work on my hardware. But that could
> only be true if the grub image files used during the installation
> were different from what it installed on the hard drive.
>
> I have an older grub floppy that I wrote under RedHat7.3. It
> loads just fine and can boot to RedHat7.3. But when I try to
> use it to boot to either Debian or Knoppix, it complains again
> about partition /dev/hda15 or hda14 respectively.
>
> Since some of this may have to do with the partition type, here
> are selected parts of my /etc/fstab:
> /dev/hda15 / reiserfs notail 0 1
> /dev/hda14 /media/knoppixroot ext2 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
> /dev/hda3 /boot ext2 defaults 1 2
>
> It would be tempting to blow this off and just live with the
> fact that Debian will only boot from a floppy. But I need to
> change the boot options to add hdc=ide-scsi. Without that I
> can't write CDs. So this really is important.
>
> I suspect I am running into at least two problems. It is hard
> to imagine how one failure mechanism could cause this odd
> combination of symptoms.
> --
> Allen Brown
> work: Agilent Technologies non-work: http://www.peak.org/~abrown/
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> "The guy sure looks like plant food to me." Little Shop of Horror
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