If you are using the install kernel the first thing you want to do is get a real kernel. The install kernel is only meant for installing. The other thing is that the install kernel is initrd, %99 of the time that is the coause of the problem you are seeing.
Ray -----Original Message----- From: Allen Brown [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, November 05, 2004 5:05 PM To: Eugene Unix and Gnu/Linux User Group; Mid-Willamette Valley Linux Users Group Subject: [lug] grub problems on Debian Sarge 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 _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
