Elusive Grub

[Icarus]

Where'd my Grub go? I installed Red Hat 7.2 on the second hard drive on my system and when I rebooted...it went straight to windows, no Grub, no Linux, no choice...OUCH!

Here's a quick rundown on the system (I'm sure this will explain lots)

ASUS A7V133/1ghz Athlon
512 PC133 SDRAM
30GB Western Digital ATA/100 7200RPM (WindowsME)
4.5 Western Digital ATA/66 5200RPM (Linux)
Promise driver on board controls 30GB drive
nVidia 256 GeForce 32MB
Sound Blaster Live!
Acer 4x4x32 CD Drive
Creative 12x DVD
and a butt load of fans (only 5 plus CPU)

I think the two problems I have is the WindowsME and more importantly, the way Promise loads the main HD...Anyone have any insight on this that would be great!

[SuperNu]

Where did you tell the Red Hat installer to install GRUB to? When I installed Windows 2000 and RH 7.2 onto my PC, I told the RH installer to install GRUB onto the master boot record of my Windows 2000 drive. Everytime I reboot, GRUB pops up and gives me the choice. You could always reinstall GRUB onto the master boot record of your Windows drive. Just watch where you install your bootloader to.
SN

[Icarus]

I'm 99% sure that I installed it to the MBR...that's why I was very shocked when it didn't load.

The second drive that Linux is installed on is the master on IDE1, but when the promise driver loads the other drive it is setup as the primary. I'm not totally sure how it even works, just that it took me 2 weeks to get it work :)

Could Grub of installed on the IDE master, but when the system loads it switches over to the ATA/100 and makes that the boot disk?

How would I go about re-installing Grub without reloading Linux again?

[SuperNu]

I am not really sure how to reinstall GRUB onto the MBR of your ME drive. Check Red Hat's site and see if they have any info. The only other thing I could think of is to see how your BIOS boots your devices. I have an Abit KT7-Raid. I don't use the onboard Raid controller at the moment, but I do select my primary hard drive to be the first device to boot. Check your BIOS and see if there is an option to select the order of devices to boot. One more thought, you did install ME first and then Red Hat 7.2? If you installed ME second, it would overwrite your MBR and kindly remove GRUB.
SN

[Icarus]

I've been running ME on this for almost a year now, loaded RH onto the second HD I've been using for file storage.
The way the system boots is very odd to say the least...the BIOS doesn't even see the ATA/100 drive because the drivers that load it don't start until the rest of the BIOS is finished. That's where I'm thinking that it went bad, Grub thought that the second drive I was loading Linux on, is the real master drive and set it up on there...instead of the ATA/100 which is the actual master (system does not know this until the Promise drivers are loaded).

So even if I reload I'll have to trick Grub into installing to the ATA/100 drive, not the other one. Am I making any since? I think there is a way to do this in the install, but I can't remember if it give enough options to perform this task... :rolleyes:

[bdg1983]

This is from Caldera...

Reinstalling Grub:

First we are going to mount the partition to the floppy mount point. This will allow us to access the drive. At the prompt you will need to type the following replacing the ** with the appropriate information.

mount /dev/hd** /mnt/floppy

This will mount that partition to the floppy mount point. now you will need to change the /usr/sbin directory on the drive. To do this type:

cd /mnt/floppy/usr/sbin/

This will put you in that directory. Now you will need to run the grub script again and reinstall grub. This gives an example of a simple reinstall for the purposes of recovering from this error. If you have more questions about what can be done here then check out the Zen the Art of Grub in our knowledge base. The link is at the bottom of this faq. To start grub type "./grub" at the prompt. This will bring you to a grub>. Now you are in the grub shell and can setup your boot loader again. The first thing that you will want to do it start by specifing the root partition:

grub> root (hd

If you hit the <Tab> here it will show you all parititions or just finish it for you if you only have one.

grub> root (hd0,

Hit the <Tab> now it will show you all the partitions on the drive again. You will need to put the number in here for your boot partition. If you do not have a boot partition then you put the number of your main linux partition(Id of 83).

grub> root (hd0,2)

Then hit enter and it should out put the following: Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83. Now you will need to write grub to the mbr again. To do this type:

grub> setup (hd0)

This will write to the mbr adn output and install line in "". You will need to run the install command and add the location of your menu.lst file. To do this type the install line inside the "" and then put a space and /boot/grub/menu.lst. It should look like this:

grub> install..... /boot/grub/menu.lst

This will complete the grub install so type "quit" at the next prompt and it will return you to the # again. Now we need to umount and reboot. Run the following commands and on reboot removethe cdrom.

#cd

#umount /dev/floppy

#reboot

Now remove the cd and it will come to the normal grub boot screen again.

[Icarus]

Those are some very good instructions and should be no problem to run...BUT

I can't get to the Linux partition, it boots straight to Windows. Any ideas of how to start Linux to do this?

[sixfeetsix]

Did you try to change your BIOS settings to tell it to run your Linux drive first?

Then Linux might start and you could use the instructions mentioned above to reinstall Grub.

I suggest installing LILO instead, it always worked better for me...

[Icarus]

Switching the boot order was a great idea, thanks for that! I got Grub to start, but now when I start to 'DOS' this comes up and hangs
Booting 'DOS'

rootnoverfy (hd1,0)
chainloader +1
Red Hat will boot fine though...I'm going to try to move the grub to the ATA/100 drive using the above instructions and see if everything works good from there.

Oh, where do I find this grub installer? I can't find the script on the first disk.

And that panal bug hit when logging on as root...BUMMER! Reload time anyway :(

[ 07 November 2001: Message edited by: mahdi ]

[sixfeetsix]

Maybe your grub configuration file isn't correct, I think it's located:
/boot/grub/menu.lst or something similar
Copy it's content here to see what could be wrong...

[ 08 November 2001: Message edited by: sixfeetsix ]

[bdg1983]

If you are still having problems with grub, then go to http://support.caldera.com/caldera and do a search for grub. Lots of good docs there on the subject.