[SOLVED] Killed my GRUB, don't know how...

plate · Last edited by plate on Sun Dec 29, 2002 2:55 am; edited 1 time in total

I am very well aware of the fact that there have been others before me posting a boot failure, with the notorious:

pilla · Posted: Sat Dec 28, 2002 5:24 pm Post subject:

have you upgraded grub these days?

I've read about a case where the stage1_5 file had to be in /boot (and not in /boot/grub). Maybe you could try that.

How are you booting? Dual Linux/Windows boot? If you are not using WinNT/XP, maybe you should install grub in (hd0,0)
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plate · Posted: Sun Dec 29, 2002 12:38 am Post subject:

No upgrade to GRUB since October. Yes, I did emerge baselayout in between, do you suspect that to cause any trouble?
I just remerged GRUB to be on the safe side and pasted stage1.5 files all over the place in /boot, let us see what happens when I reboot now (first time using Lynx to post here from inside the CD-image, jeezuz, all those colours! All those ... other ... colours!

).
And sorry, but I am not going to touch that MBR. With the number of reinstallations I have to have on the XP side of things, I had rather keep everything the way it was before.

plate · Posted: Sun Dec 29, 2002 12:56 am Post subject:

Nothing.

GRUB just sits there pondering whether it's alive or not. Probably is, but doing zilch, nada, diddley. Very disappointing.

Any other ideas?

plate · Posted: Sun Dec 29, 2002 3:08 am Post subject:

And this is even more embarrassing: I fixed it, but cannot say for sure how I did it because I was fed up with rebooting all the time, and in the end I tried just too many things in one smooth go to be able to pinpoint any of them as the sole reason why everything works again:

rm -r /boot (I just had to...)
mkdir /boot, copied my backup kernel to it
Remerged GRUB
Recompiled my new kernel
Edited grub.conf again, recreated soft link to menu.lst
dd'ed the dummy boot sector for the NT bootloader
Booted into XP first
Edited boot.ini to include the fresh dummy boot sector file

And at the next reboot everything was thumbs up. Naturally. A dozen new gray hairs for nothing.

All I can say is: If anybody else out there ever runs into the same problem, just try everything I did. It'll take you longer than necessary, but at least you'll get there...

ichnaton

Just to mention an old cow, for those to come on and avoid this path. I've had a running suse system for years, recently with grub. Now I'm adding gentoo until it works as good as the suse and then switch.

At a certain moment, I've added lines for the gentoo kernel and the gentoo kernel itself to the /boot partition and menu.lst of the suse.

Reboot..died: GRUB

cause: probably a version conflict of the grub's but actually i still don't know for sure.

The easiest thing to fix this was to upgrade (you know, that outdated process with a pacj of cd's) the suse and have it redo my /boot.

bruce2 · n00b Joined: 13 Jul 2005 Posts: 1

I just experienced the same problem.

Remaking the dummy boot sector, copying it to the windows partition and reinstalling fixes the problem.

(e.g. dd if=/dev/hdaX of=/bootsec.lin bs=512 count=1, then copy that to windows and edit c:\boot.ini).

nixnut · Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 6:45 pm Post subject:

That was a nice piece of grave digging :wink:

My compliments on your searching skills.

Oh, and welcome to the forums.
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plate · Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 7:37 pm Post subject:

Hehe. Why waste a perfectly good thread only because it's two years old? :mrgreen:

Welcome aboard, bruce2.