Error in GRUB I'm not using (Man-Live)

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2007-01-13 08:37am

So my server falls over and I reinstall with Mandriva Live (which I'm finding much easier for a relative novice to use and much easier on the hardware). However, my data is kept on some drives connected to a PCI-RAID card. Mandriva boots off the CD and installs fine, plays nice with my LVG and everything. I use lilo (not GRUB) and reboot... and there's the fucking GRUB GRUB GRUB ... error. Removing the drives from the PCI card makes it go away, and booting off the CD and manually mounting the LVG lets me use the drives and access files just fine.

I dimly recall having this problem some time ago, but no combination of BIOS settings seems to help. The system is an old-as-hell Intel board with onboard SCSI (which I'm booting from) and an IDE bus that can't handle newer drives (hence the PCI card). It worked fine with Fedora and the hardware obviously isn't a problem since it works fine when booting off the CD. I've tried installing with the PCI card in use, and installing with it disconnected and adding it later after enough boots to finish the install.

And I'm not even fucking *using* GRUB. Grrr. It's not a huge problem - I've got much better hardware gathering dust anyway, so I'll just throw together another box tomorrow - but it's fucking annoying. Anyone got the Secret Solution(tm)?

Resinence · Post by **Resinence** » 2007-01-13 09:49am

Code: Select all
Code Listing 7.1: Grub Output

GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB
  GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB
...

Solution

According to airhead this can be caused by having your bios detect your disks automatically. Try to set your bios entry to User Type HDD.

Another possibility is that you had Grub installed on your MBR and tried reinstalling it (for instance due to hard disk changes) but used the wrong setup and root commands.

I'm leaning towards number 2 for obvious reasons, infact I'v had the same problem before. I have no experience with LILO because it's ancient now but you may be able to fix it by reinstalling grub, you can do it from the CD's console.

Navigate to your /boot directory (mount it first if necessary) and double check your config file first, it will be under a LILO or GRUB subdirectory. Grub uses grub.conf under /boot/grub/grub.conf

If you decide to reinstall grub from the console you just have to type:

Code: Select all

grub
root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)

If the drive is SCSI use sd instead of hd, the first number is the drive number starting from 0 and the second is the partition from 0. Root should be your /boot partition. Setup without a partition specified installs it into the MBR, with a partition into the partitions boot sector.

From there you just navigate to /boot/grub and edit grub.conf so it knows where your kernel and root drive is. An initrd is unnecessary unless you really really need a splash screen on boot up.

Example:

default 0
timeout 10

title=Mandriva
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/kernel root=/dev/sda3

Or you could just reinstall the whole system =/
LILO is really really old though, and has problems on some hardware, use GRUB if you can, it looks like the old system on there used GRUB anyway.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2007-01-13 09:56am

I'll give that a go. The BIOS isn't set to detect jack shit (there's nothing plugged into the onboard IDE except a DVD drive anyway). I'm somewhat confused as to why GRUB is starting at all: the LVG doesn't have a boot partition or any Linux directories at all, and the SCSI is set up to use LILO and boot properly. Is it a default or something?

Err, now that I think of it, the LVG has some 6Mb partition (yeah, six whole megabytes) that doesn't seem to do anything and I don't mount. I guess it's something Fedora had lying around?

Resinence · Post by **Resinence** » 2007-01-13 10:04am

The 6mb thing is probably fedora's /boot partition, and it probably has grub installed. You could try messing with cfdisk and changing the boot flag to a different partition, or reinstall a new grub/lilo onto that partition. I'm not sure how much info on partitions mandriva gives during the install though.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2007-01-13 10:10am

Not much. But the all the system parts were on the SCSI drive: I didn't even add the IDE stuff till later.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2007-01-13 06:58pm

Eh. Forcing a new GRUB setup didn't help, so I'll just build a new server.

What the fuck kind of worthless error mode is 'GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB'? I mean, it'd be super funny in the 80s, but I'd rather get a fucking interface to say 'no, dumbass, boot off sda1 like I fucking told you to'.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2007-01-13 09:30pm

I think I'm just being a noob: Man-Live doesn't seem to use a /boot partition. The IDE drives are in an LVG, and I've poked around enough to find out that the LVG space has a 65Mb part at the start (that won't mount, and I get some crazy error) and the other 260ish Gb is the actual mountable area. Since Fedora fell over due to some strange problem with the LVG, is it possible that it's fucked in some strange way and that is causing the problems? I know that's pretty crazy, since the LVG shouldn't even exist until a later boot stage, but I'm a novice.