On Tuesday 19 September 2006 12:19 pm, Carl William Spitzer IV wrote:
On Sun, 2006-09-17 at 10:44 -0400, Paul Abrahams wrote:
one other thing I tried, which didn't help: I used a Windows XP CD (horrors!) to replace the MBR with a standard one (one of the SuSE manuals recommends this). The machine then wouldn't boot at all -- just got a blinking cursor. Another round of grub-install got me back to the Read Error.
Backup your files on this machine and zero out the drive using the manufacturers disk for this purpose. Reinstall and this time use a smaller partition for the other OS and the standard four for linux /boot / /swap and /home. Make sure /boot is below sector 1024 as you had to do under lilo.
I tried reformatting all partitions and doing a complete reinstall. And I still got the read error! But now I have a hunch of what is going on, yet to be verified. You might remember that I commented that the problems started after I had moved the guts of the machine (motherboard and drives) to a new case. That didn't seem relevant at the time. I also noted that the results of root (hd0,6) were inconsistent, which strongly suggests that hardware is involved. Putting all of this together, the most likely cause is that the hard drive cable is not well seated in the connectors. I haven't yet opened up the box to reseat the IDE cable (it really is an 80-pin one) but I shall do so shortly. One intermittent connection and one missing connection could well account for everything I have seen. I've checked out the drive itself quite thoroughly -- but I don't know how to check out the cable other than inspecting it visually. Any ideas? I'll report back if I have more success once I've tried reseating the cable. Paul