I tried irc.freenode.net #grub (twice) and nobody responded, so to the trilug list I come...
Please bear with me as I'm trying to be as specific and detailed at the outset as possible to give a clear picture of what's happening. Since I'm not an expert on this, there may be a lot of useless data here. I have a system running Gentoo 2005.1, with all recent updates. Last Sunday, I attempted to run xcdroast as root (it refused to run as a user or under sudo...we can address that later, so no flames, please). It locked the system (X refused to respond, keyboard Num Lock refused to respond, remote login to kill the process was useless in that login was allowed but kill, reboot, even init 0 responded with errors). I powered the system off, and powered it back on. It came up and said ----- GRUB _ ----- and sat there doing nothing. So I rebooted it (actually, the keyboard refused to respond again, so I went through the manual power cycle process). I popped in my Gentoo 2005.1 livecd, mounted everything, and ran fsck on all the disks. Aside from a large number of inodes freed, it passed muster. Before I go further, here's the output of fdisk -l: ----- Disk /dev/hda: 3240 MB, 3240646656 bytes 15 heads, 63 sectors/track, 6697 cylinders Units = cylinders of 945 * 512 = 483840 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 * 1 217 102501 83 Linux /dev/hda2 218 6697 3061800 83 Linux Disk /dev/sda: 9139 MB, 9139200000 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1111 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 261 2096451 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda2 262 1111 6827625 83 Linux Disk /dev/sdb: 36.7 GB, 36703918080 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4462 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 1 653 5245191 83 Linux /dev/sdb2 654 4462 30595792+ 83 Linux ----- and the corresponding mounts from mount: ----- /dev/sdb2 on / type ext3 (rw) /dev/sdb1 on /usr type ext3 (rw) /dev/sda2 on /home type ext3 (rw) /dev/hda1 on /boot type ext2 (rw) /dev/hda2 on /var type ext3 (rw) none on /proc type proc (rw,nodiratime) ----- To verify that I have the right disks for the next thing I wanted to do, I checked /boot/grub/device.map: ----- (fd0) /dev/fd0 (hd0) /dev/hda (hd1) /dev/sda (hd2) /dev/sdb ----- Now then...the next thing I did was to manually re-setup grub on the first MBR of all disks (NB, it doesn't show here, but when I ran grub, there were an awful lot of error messages about fd0; more on those later): ----- grub> root (hd0,0) Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83 grub> setup (hd0) Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... yes Checking if "/boot/grub/stage2" exists... yes Checking if "/boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes Running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)"... 16 sectors are embedded. succeeded Running "install /boot/grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+16 p (hd0,0)/boot/grub/stage2 /boot/grub/menu.lst"... succeeded Done. grub> setup (hd1) Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... yes Checking if "/boot/grub/stage2" exists... yes Checking if "/boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes Running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd1)"... 16 sectors are embedded. succeeded Running "install /boot/grub/stage1 d (hd1) (hd1)1+16 p (hd0,0)/boot/grub/stage2 /boot/grub/menu.lst"... succeeded Done. grub> setup (hd2) Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... yes Checking if "/boot/grub/stage2" exists... yes Checking if "/boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes Running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd2)"... 16 sectors are embedded. succeeded Running "install /boot/grub/stage1 d (hd2) (hd2)1+16 p (hd0,0)/boot/grub/stage2 /boot/grub/menu.lst"... succeeded Done. ----- looks ok to me, other than the messages previously mentioned. I rebooted. This time it came up and stated that it was loading Grub stage 1.5. So far so good...until I saw the following (from memory): ----- Grub Error 17 ----- Nothing beyond "Error 17". I googled all over the place but didn't find anything that helped me in particular. So for giggles I decided to do a grub-install --recheck to see if everything was OK. ----- # grub-install --recheck /dev/hda Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time. end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0 end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0 Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 0 end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0 Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 0 ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide hdc: No disk in drive hdc: No disk in drive end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0 end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0 end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0 Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 0 end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0 Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 0 ----- Wow. All of the fd0 error messages I saw when I initially ran grub. Here's a problem, though: grub goes through its errors and then gives me an interface to work in. grub-install, which should give me some sort of status, just keeps spitting these errors out. I have to CTRL+C to get out of it. I can mount it off the livecd (which it presently is), so it's not hopeless for retrieving data off of, but this situation has me bothered. Optimally, I'd like to get it back up and booting properly. Failing that, I'd like some sort of advice as to what to do (older SCSI drives, older IDE drive, etc). So....can anyone help me? :) -- William Sutton -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
