boot directory seems unreadable

[vimarone]

I am not sure what this means, but when I look in the /boot directory the only thing I see is

?.? ?.. ?;9? ??

grub is havine errors when trying to emerge it. I doesn't want to write to the /boot directory.

anyone have any ideas?


thanks

[rac]

What filesystem did you use when making /boot?
_________________
For every higher wall, there is a taller ladder

[vimarone]

i used ext3, when I couldn't get it to work I did an fdisk and changed it to ext2 and still have the same problem.





Thanks,

[sn1987a]

Have you tried to fsck the /boot partition?

You say that you did an "fdisk" and changed it ext2. What exactly did you do with fdisk? The partition code for ext2 and ext3 are the same? If I am remembering correctly all you need to do is mount the partition as ext2 to convert it from ext3. You can convert it back to ext3 with tune2fs -j

[vimarone]

i just tried the fsck

fsck.ext2: Input/output error


when I changed it to ext2 I delete the partition with fdisk, rebuilt it and made it an ext2 with mke2fs. being the newb that I am, I hadn't realized there was am easier way.

thanks

[sn1987a]

[vimarone]

I did fisk the partition and it came up clean. When I emerge grub it wrote to the /boot. I still have the other files in boot

?.? ?9;? ??.??


When I went to set grub up I get this

grub> root (hd0,0)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83

grub> setup (hd0)
Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exits. . . no
Checking if "/grub/stage1" exits. . . no

Error 15: File not found



When I look in the /boot directory I see grub. I also can find the Stage1 in /boot/grub




hmmmmmm.. . . . not sure what to do?

thanks

[sn1987a]

Is your boot partition currently mounted? It sounds as if the grub information is in the directory /boot, not on the filesystem mounted on /boot. If not, mount /boot then copy the files from /usr/share/grub/i386-pc/* to /boot/grub (mkdir /boot/grub if you need to). You will also want to copy the file /usr/portage/sys-apps/grub/files/splash.xpm.gz into /boot/grub

At this point you should be able to use the grub command to get the boot loader setup. Then you can get on with getting /boot/grub/menu.lst setup and copying your kernel over. Make sure that /boot/boot exists, if not do 'ln -s . /boot/boot'

Good luck

[wiki]

Could you post your /etc/fstab

or output of mount with no parameters

I had a very similar problem, where

mount /dev/hdxx /boot

failed

[vimarone]

Sorry getting back here so late, been out of town.

It acts as though it has mounted the /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/boot. however when I run grub do a setup (hd0)
It acts like it can't read the /boot

right now when I run the mount command with no paramaters I get nothing.

when I mount /dev/hda1 to /mnt/gentoo/boot it tells me it is busy.

I just brought my machine down and am now going to try again using the cd to boot from.

Thanks to everyone for all their comments is is very appreciated

[pilla]

mount without parameters will tell you what is mounted.
mount -a will remount everything, I think.

[bernd]

[vimarone]

This is what my /boot looks like:

cdimage bin # ls /boot
?.. ?;9? bzImage grub ??

This is what happens when I try to setup grub:

grub> root (hd0,0)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83

grub> setup (hd0)
Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... no
Checking if "/grub/stage1" exists... no

Error 15: File not found

Here is my /etc/fstab:


/dev/hda1 /boot ext2 noauto,noatime 1 2
/dev/hda3 / ext3 noatime 0 1
/dev/hda2 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner,ro,kudzu 0 0
/dev/hdd /mnt/cdr iso9660 noauto,owner,ro,kudzu 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0

# glibc 2.2 and above expects tmpfs to be mounted at /dev/shm for
# POSIX shared memory (shm_open, shm_unlink). Adding the following
# line to /etc/fstab should take care of this:
# (tmpfs is a dynamically expandable/shrinkable ramdisk, and will use almost no
# memory if not populated with files)

tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0


I am not really sure what is going on.

I did a mount -a
then did a mount command, below is what is showed me

mount
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)


Any ideas?

[pilla]

maybe you should reformat your /boot

[vimarone]

I did and fdisk on /dev/hda2 after umounting it from /boot

here is what i get( can anyone translate this for me?)

cdimage root # fdisk /dev/hda1

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/hda1: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 13 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1p1 ? 116388 126889 84344761 69 Unknown
Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(68, 13, 10) logical=(116387, 225, 36)
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(288, 115, 43) logical=(126888, 82, 1)
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary:
phys=(288, 115, 43) should be (288, 254, 63)
/dev/hda1p2 ? 105915 222310 934940732+ 73 Unknown
Partition 2 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(371, 114, 37) logical=(105914, 175, 47)
Partition 2 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(366, 32, 33) logical=(222309, 108, 57)
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary:
phys=(366, 32, 33) should be (366, 254, 63)
/dev/hda1p3 ? 1 1 0 74 Unknown
Partition 3 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(371, 114, 37) logical=(0, 40, 54)
Partition 3 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(372, 97, 50) logical=(0, 40, 53)
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary:
phys=(372, 97, 50) should be (372, 254, 63)
/dev/hda1p4 1 213826 1717556736 0 Empty
Partition 4 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(0, 0, 0) logical=(0, 0, 1)
Partition 4 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(0, 0, 0) logical=(213825, 235, 42)
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary:
phys=(0, 0, 0) should be (0, 254, 63)

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Command (m for help):

[pilla]

I'm not fdisk expert, but I would say your partition table is screwed.

And fdisking != formatting
see "man mkfs" for details.

[vimarone]

I reformatted the /dev/hda1
made it ext3

this time when I mounted it I did this:

mount /dev/hda1 /boot -t ext3

emerged grub again, and then ran grub. this time is read everything in the /boot directory. No problems.

I am now ready to reboot and see if it will work.

Thanks to everyone who responded to my post it has been greatly appreciated.

[pilla]

Another happy customer