Yes, I realize that formatting / won't affect the MBR (especially since
/ is on hdb), but when I installed Mandrake last time it did give me a
working GRUB setup. I'm not sure why the stand-alone GRUB and LILO
utilities can't seem to do this, but they obviously are not up to the
task for some reason.
My motherboard (and everything else in the machine) is only about 6
months old, and I've kept up-to-date on all BIOS and firmware for
everything I have, from the system board down to the CD drives, and all
devices in between.
The thing that really gets me is, the only thing that has changed is the
contents of hda. Wait a minute ... that's not entirely true; the
partition sizes have changed. hda1 was only 2GB in size before. The
partition table was trashed, which is what precipitated the
reformatting, and after a lot of mucking about I decided to fdisk the
whole drive. I made the whole 30GB a single partition, formatted it,
then fdisk'd it into two 15GB partitions and formatted them. Overkill?
Sounds like it, but it was apparently necessary. Formatting the
partitions individually didn't get the thing working. I've been working
on my own hardware for over 10 years, and have never been through such
an ordeal except in the bad old days of 20MB Seagate drives. (Harkening
back to a recent thread in this group -- the drive that gave me all of
this trouble is a Maxtor, six months old. My 30GB WD [hde] performed
valiantly and flawlessly though all of this.)
Jay
John Wolford wrote:
>
> This probably won't work. Check what other's say about this (obviously) but i
> think that / is seperate from the MBR and so formatting / will do nothing for
> how your machine is(n't) booting. Although when you have exausted the possible,
> start probing the impossible.....
>
> What you need is some hardware/harddrive guru to tell you what kind of
> geometry-of-your-drive info you have to set up explicitly in
> LILO/GRUB/whatever. Have you posted all the information possible on your hd
> setup? Should you upgrade your motherboard bios? When you have exausted the
> possible.....
>
> dunno :-)
> j
>
> --- Jay DeKing <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Sorry, that didn't work either. I tried it with both LILO and GRUB, with
> > the same results as always.
> >
> > The next step, I guess, is to boot up with the install CD and do an
> > install/update. Since I have most of the programs and data on partitions
> > separate from "/", I shouldn't lose too much stuff when it makes me
> > format "/" itself.
--
There is a fine line between 'hobby' and 'mental illness'.
