A colleague who is trying to install suse 9 on his system has hit a curious problem. On the first reboot at the end of the main part of the install, instead of carrying on and finishing those configuration parts of the install that need the main system running, upon reboot the system hangs with a "grub>" prompt. I have looked at his / partition and can see nothing obviously wrong, it has a proper "/boot/grub/menu.1st" file etc, but it occurs to me that on this first boot things happen differently to normal in that (ISTR) it drops straight into configuring the system (network, printers, users, etc) so it would appear that grub is not getting the correct script to boot into this mode, nor is it using the menu.1st. Can anyone provide any pointers as to what might be going wrong here? -- Tim Nicholson http://www.bbc.co.uk/ This e-mail (and any attachments) is confidential and may contain personal views which are not the views of the BBC unless specifically stated. If you have received it in error, please delete it from your system. Do not use, copy or disclose the information in any way nor act in reliance on it and notify the sender immediately. Please note that the BBC monitors e-mails sent or received. Further communication will signify your consent to this.
On 6/1/05, Tim Nicholson
A colleague who is trying to install suse 9 on his system has hit a curious problem.
On the first reboot at the end of the main part of the install, instead of carrying on and finishing those configuration parts of the install that need the main system running, upon reboot the system hangs with a "grub>" prompt.
I have looked at his / partition and can see nothing obviously wrong, it has a proper "/boot/grub/menu.1st" file etc, but it occurs to me that on this first boot things happen differently to normal in that (ISTR) it drops straight into configuring the system (network, printers, users, etc) so it would appear that grub is not getting the correct script to boot into this mode, nor is it using the menu.1st.
Can anyone provide any pointers as to what might be going wrong here? -- Tim Nicholson
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Hi Tim, there could be quiet a lot reasons and there are even as much resolutions out there. You should also search the mailing list archives. There is no error message? But I'll try to give some ideas.. - grub has not correctly been installed you might to try to boot in rescue mode ( maybe you have to load some kernel modules first, for filesystems or harddisk controller ) and mount the root partition e.g. to /mnt. Then check the grub configuration files in boot/grub/ (in device.map, is hd0 pointing to device? e.g. /dev/hda ). Try to reinstall grub with #>chroot /mnt #>grub-install hd0 - system is old but has a big harddisk check BIOS settings for this hdd if it is in LBA mode.. ( mh.. grub should mention that as disk geometry error ) try using a separate boot partition under the 1024 block.. if nothing helps, try to use lilo instead of grub ( this seemed to help in some cases, see list ) hope this helps, Markus
Tim Nicholson wrote:
On the first reboot at the end of the main part of the install, instead of carrying on and finishing those configuration parts of the install that need the main system running, upon reboot the system hangs with a "grub>" prompt.
Does your colleague have a dual booting system by any chance? What kind of disk configuration the system has? Is he using some other boot manager to boot into grub which then would load Linux?
Can anyone provide any pointers as to what might be going wrong here?
If the system really hangs at the grub prompt as you described, then it could be that grub has failed to load the stage 2 loader. That sort of thing happened to me when I installed 9.3. I have two disks in my system: the boot disk has Win XP and Linux is installed on the second disk. I'm also using another boot manager on the boot disk to boot into Windows or Linux (or any any other OS I care to try out). I managed to fix the problem by booting from the Suse install DVD and then selecting the option to boot into an existing Linux installation. The file /etc/grub.conf contains the actual commands used when grub was installed. In my case the problem was caused by a missing option 'd' when YaST installed grub into /boot partition. The commands in /etc/grub.conf can also be entered manually from grub shell. Below is a copy of my fixed grub configuration (your colleague should change the references to hd1,4 according to his disk configuration). /etc/grub.conf: root (hd1,4) install --stage2=/boot/grub/stage2 /grub/stage1 d (hd1,4) /grub/stage2 0x8000 (hd1,4)/grub/menu.lst quit Quote from grub info: "If the option `d' is present, the Stage 1 will always look for the actual disk STAGE2_FILE was installed on, rather than using the booting drive." I hope this will help your colleague. -- Martti Laaksonen
participants (3)
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Markus Natter -
Martti Laaksonen -
Tim Nicholson