On Monday 30 January 2006 10:33 pm, BandiPat wrote:

On Monday 30 January 2006 16:24, S Glasoe wrote:

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On Monday 30 January 2006 2:16 pm, Gracia M. Littauer wrote:

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when I tried to reboot I get a little groan from my HD & a black screen with <GRUB loading Stage2.....> on the upper left side and no HD activity.

Sounds like the hard drive is dying. Get the Ultimate Boot CD (ultimatebootcd.com) and run the drive tests from the manufacturer of your hard drive. Well worth the download for those diagnostics alone plus it has tons of other software for inspecting systems.

That test may tell you whether the drive is dying or if it has other problems.

...

I can boot from the SuSE 10 DVD by going to <other> in the option page & choosing <from installed system>. I tried <repair>, but it can't find any mounted partitions! this even though it boots from them. Yast shows them.

We reinstalled the kernel, rewrote mbr, checked the bios, checked logs, checked /etc/fstab, checked my sanity!

Any ideas, short of a new clean install & a 1500+ watt UPS!!!

Clean install to a spare drive while this one gets RMA'd under warranty?

...

-- Gracia

Stan

========= Not the hard drive Stan. Remember it runs fine once you get past a certain point with the DVD. Once booted, no problems, no errors, all seems to work as before. It just won't boot from Grub on the hard drive. It also says it can't find any suitable Linux partitions when she goes into the repair mode, yet there they are, same as before. Really odd problem.

Lee

Well... Since the HDD won't boot on its own and the MBR was rewritten and it seems to run fine otherwise: Make sure the IDE cable is well connected. Re-seat it at both the mainboard and HDD itself. Do you have another known good 80-pin IDE cable you could test this drive and system with? Make sure the the drive is at the end of the IDE cable and is either jumpered as Master/Primary or Cable Select and is on the Primary IDE controller port. Disconnect any other IDE device except this one HDD from the mainboard and see what happens. Do you have a spare HDD to try in this system and does it behave correctly? Does this drive behave correctly in another system? Stan

On Tuesday 31 January 2006 00:08, Ed Harrison wrote:

** Reply to message from "Gracia M. Littauer" on Mon, 30 Jan 2006 15:16:28 -0500

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when I tried to reboot I get a little groan from my HD & a black screen with <GRUB loading Stage2.....> on the upper left side and no HD activity.

Why not use the DVD to boot into this installation and rerun the boot-loader installation in YAST?

Ed Harrison, Linux User # 199533 SuSE10.0, Kernel 2.6.15 PolarBar Mailer 1.26 ========

Thanks Ed, but reread the original email, it's already been done. Next guess? It's a mystery worth solving to be sure! ;o) Lee

Did anyone mention you can repair the GRUB/LiLo bootloader using the DVD or CD boot disc from SuSE? You know, installation, I agree, repair filesystem, yada yada? Adam

On Tuesday 31 January 2006 02:05, Per Jessen wrote:

Gracia M. Littauer wrote:

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We reinstalled the kernel, rewrote mbr, checked the bios, checked logs, checked /etc/fstab, checked my sanity!

Reinstall the boot-loader. With lilo this is simply accomplished by entering "lilo", I don't know about grub.

/Per Jessen, Zürich =========== Oops, looks like she didn't mention the boot-loader specifically, but it's been done. Next guess?

This one is a true mystery readers, I'm hoping it can be solved! Lee

On Tuesday 31 January 2006 9:16 am, Per Jessen wrote:

BandiPat wrote:

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On Tuesday 31 January 2006 02:05, Per Jessen wrote:

...

Gracia M. Littauer wrote:

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We reinstalled the kernel, rewrote mbr, checked the bios, checked logs, checked /etc/fstab, checked my sanity!

Reinstall the boot-loader. With lilo this is simply accomplished by entering "lilo", I don't know about grub.

/Per Jessen, Zürich

=========== Oops, looks like she didn't mention the boot-loader specifically, but it's been done. Next guess?

This one is a true mystery readers, I'm hoping it can be solved!

Assuming the harddisk is in fact fine, something's got to be wrong in the bootloading. I don't know what grub stage 2 is, but it doesn't sound like we've started loading the kernel yet? And the system is bootable as long as it's booted with the DVD first. I probably can't help much more 'coz I use only lilo myself.

/Per Jessen, Zürich

GRUB stage 2 is when it starts looking for the initrd and kernel, etc. Stage 1 is the MBR portion. So it seems like the drive's MBR is OK but maybe /boot/grub has corruption? Or the initrd or kernel is trashed there? Possibly the device map... If there is a back-up of /boot then we could restore that when booted from the DVD rescue system... Stan

S Glasoe wrote:

GRUB stage 2 is when it starts looking for the initrd and kernel, etc.

Yes, but the first thing that should happen is the display of the boot menu text or graphics. Only after something has been selected does it start searching for kernels

On Tuesday 31 January 2006 1:17 pm, Sunny wrote:

On 1/31/06, S Glasoe wrote:

...

GRUB stage 2 is when it starts looking for the initrd and kernel, etc. Stage 1 is the MBR portion. So it seems like the drive's MBR is OK but maybe /boot/grub has corruption? Or the initrd or kernel is trashed there? Possibly the device map...

If there is a back-up of /boot then we could restore that when booted from the DVD rescue system...

Stan

Stage 2 is actually when the grub interpreter is loaded, a menu.lst file is located and displayed, and the control is given to the user to select the next action. Stage 1 (as it is limited only in 512 bites of code) takes care to find and run Stage 2.

-- Svetoslav Milenov (Sunny)

Thank you Anders and Sunny. I knew if I posted "almost correct" info we on the list would get the right stuff. I was in a hurry and didn't think through the whole grub process. Maybe it is just /boot/grub/menu.lst that is corrupted. I would advocate replacing, from a known good backup, the whole /boot directory. Stan

On Tuesday 31 January 2006 16:55, Jerry Feldman wrote: [...]

Fortunately, the menu.lst is a plain text file, but YaST can rebuild that for you as well as rebuild the MBR.

One good test is to boot the installation CD, and boot the installed system. -- Jerry Feldman

------------- Good point that wasn't mentioned Jerry. Booting from the DVD or CD1 at the Grub screen, the boot from hard disk doesn't work either. Still she gets a Stage 2 stoppage. It's only if she goes through the Installation selection and far enough along to choose "Other" button, will the system boot. Makes you think it's a kernel error on the hard drive, but it's been replaced and checked also. All files have been examined, logs checked, without giving one clue as to the problem. It's a really odd problem and mystery. regards, Lee