I have a machine at home which has SuSE and Windows on separate drives. A while back windows died and had to be reinstalled, which of course blew away the MBR. This weekend I booted linux from the dvd and proceeded to
-----Original Message----- From: Greg Wallace [mailto:gregwallace@fastmail.fm] Sent: Monday, April 03, 2006 12:25 PM To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: RE: [SLE] GRUB problems On Monday, April 03, 2006 @ 8:34 AM, Mike Cleary wrote: perform
an update (9.2 to 10). During the upgrade, the GRUB install failed (couldn't find stage 1). I tried every combo offered in the way of where to install GRUB, but it failed every time. I usually install it in the MBR of /dev/hda1 (windows drive), which may or may not be the best place to put it. Even so, I tried installing it in the boot sector of the root partition, but still no joy. Unfortunately, windows needs to be the default OS to boot on this machine, and before having to reinstall windows I had no problem using GRUB. Any assistance w/ resolving this issue would be greatly appreciated!
TIA,
Mike
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Cleary_Mike@emc.com
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A wink is as good as a nod to a blind horse.
Stage 1 has to be written to the MBR. Try the following. 1) Boot Linux from the CD. 2) In a shell, enter grub 3) at the prompt, enter -- find /boot/grub/stage1 This should tell you where stage 1 is targeted to be installed (something like (hd0,1). Your /boot/grub/device.map will tell you what hd the hdn in this message is referring to; i. e., hda, hdb, etc.). If nothing has changed since you upgraded to 10, it should still be the hard drive of the Windows machine (that's the boot drive on your computer, based on what you have said). 4) Then do root (hdn1,n2) <- n1 and n2 are the numbers that came out of the above find command; i. e., just enter that same string in the root command 5) Finally, do setup (hdn1) <- n1 being the number following the hd in the above statetments. This setup command causes the stage1 located in /boot/grub on your machine to be written to the mbr. For My system, the above process looks like this -- grub find /boot/grub/stage1 -> It comes back (hd0,1) root (hd0,1) setup (hd0) I'm sure all of this can be accomplished from the graphical interface, but I never made the switch, as I have gotten used to using this method over the years. I have had to go through this every time I upgrade my system since about 9.1 (I wish to hell I knew why!). For some reason, I never get a clean MBR written when I upgrade. Every time, after I upgrade, I try to do some more tweaking in the grub files hoping it will work right for the next upgrade (it never does). I did some more tweaking since installing 10.0, so I'm hoping I won't have that problem this next time (but I'd bet money I will!). Good luck. Greg Wallace Thanks! I've never had a problem during upgrades before, but perhaps because the MBR was blown away... Mike ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------- cleary_mike@emc.com -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com