[ILUG] Grub Boot issue

[Darragh Bailey]

Quoting Darragh Bailey <felix at compsoc.nuigalway.ie>:

<snipped>

>
> I could try from grub command line as well, if thats the only way, but I'm
> sure
> there is something simple I'm missing that ananconda does that I don't.
>

As it turns out I managed to sort this out myself. Eventually.

It appears to be due to the fact that I'm using a RAID controller for a number
of hard drives and that there is a hard drive connected to my IDE controller as
well.

As a result the BIOS will report the drives like so

/dev/hda
/dev/hde
/dev/hdf
/dev/hdg
/dev/hdh

But /dev/hdf is the drive that is booted from and therefore grub needs to know
that its actually (hd0) and not (hd2).

I'll go through what I did in the shell which is the standard method but doesn't
work, and is what I think is also called when you run grub-install
$ umount /boot
$ grub
grub> device (hd0) /dev/hdf
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... yes
 Checking if "/grub/stage2" exists... yes
 Checking if "/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes
 Running "embed /grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)"...  16 sectors are embedded.
succeeded
 Running "install /grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+16 p (hd0,0)/grub/stage2 /grub/grub
.conf"... succeeded
Done.
grub> exit
$

where as the correct method appears to be instead of 'setup (hd0)', I needed to
run,
grub> install /grub/stage1 d (hd0) /grub/stage2 p (hd0,0)/grub/grub.conf


the extra d option appears to be required since my drives are reported in a
different order than the BIOS reports them to be. What I haven't yet worked out
or followed up on is the (hd0)1+16 item.


Supprisingly enough the correct command line is found in the anaconda log file.
/var/log/anaconda.log


That will teach me to look at the log files in more detail in the future.

--
Darragh Bailey

"Nothing's foolproof to a sufficently talented fool"