after emerge update, boot failure with 'BootPart'

thundercow · n00b Joined: 17 May 2008 Posts: 2

After doing the standard emerge --sync and emerge --update --deep world, I suddenly can't boot, and displayed on the screen is a message about 'BootPart 2.6 Bootsector'. I did not install this product. I have never even heard of it. Prior to updating I was dual booting vista and gentoo, with vista's boot loader on the MBR, chaining to grub on one of the partitions. Vista still boots fine. Grub is dead. Could it be that 'BootPart' found its way into an ebuild? If not that, then maybe my machine has been hacked.

shadow255 · Guru Joined: 04 Apr 2003 Posts: 406

<soapbox>
There is always the chance in your process of performing package updates that a package requires more action after it is emerged. There is really no such thing as a "standard" emerge --update --deep world when world can contain things like sys-boot/grub. Always pay attention to the warnings you are given by portage after your emerge finishes!
</soapbox>

So your system now cannot boot to Gentoo, most likely because one of the updates was GRUB. Your solution is to boot from a livecd, take all the steps needed to chroot to your Gentoo environment and carry out the post-emerge GRUB reinstall. Good luck!
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thundercow · n00b Joined: 17 May 2008 Posts: 2

Thanks for the reply. Sorry if I used misleading language in my original post.

I was able to reinstall grub without a hitch. Everything works now as expected. My real concern is how BootPart got installed to my partition's boot record. I am sure I never installed this manually. I don't know where it came from. I decided to post something on the forum in case others were having the same problem I am concerned that it somehow made it way into the portage tree.

Angryguy · Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 12:49 am Post subject:

I normally wouldn't reply to a topic this old, but it's the only reference to this issue I've seen.

I just finished a mass (deep) upgrade of my Gentoo system, and am now greeted by a "BootPart 2.50 Bootsector (c) 1993-2002 Gilles Vollant" message instead of my good 'ol grub.

Any idea what this is, or how it got installed? I'm guessing it's somehow a dependency on some really old package, though exactly how I got an older version than thundercow nearly two years later is beyond me.

Note: I'm not asking how to fix this either (though I need to find a working LiveCD before I can fix it), just trying to figure out what this thing is and how it got in there.

Genone · Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 12:57 am Post subject:

Looking at http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm it seems to be more of a Windows software than something Linux related ...

Angryguy · Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2010 2:44 am Post subject:

Looks like your right, though I've never seen that name for it before, nor a prompt quite like that one.

I'm guessing it's some rare/hidden about page that pops up when it tries loading an invalid partition [I had the windows MBR chain loading Grub). I've had similar bootloader issues before, but this is the first time I've ever seen that dialogue.

Google seems to have failed me on this one

(though it did bring me to this post)

Thanks