boot disk problem [solved]

[Guest bob506]

My problem is that I require a boot floppy to boot my mandrake 10.1 system but I would like to change it so that I can boot directly from the hard disk.

 

I don't understant why the floppy is required, (when I check whats on it, it appears empty) but its perhaps explained by the way my system has evolved. I had two hard drives when I initially installed linux but since then, one, hda, died and has been replaced. I have installed various linux distrubutions on the two drives at various times to try them out.

 

Fiinally I have settled happily into mandrake 10.1 on hdc, using GRUB as the boot loader, with the grub files also found on hdc. hda is used to store mp3 and photos.

 

If I try to boot without the floppy i get this message, and the booting stops.

 

Attempting boot from CD-ROM

Attempting boot from floppy drive A

Attempting b oot floppy from hard drive ©

 

I need to change things so the hard drive © becomes the boot disk.

 

Thanks for your help

[arctic]

Hi.

 

Mandrake/Mandriva was always able to boot from the harddisk and it was always the default setting.

 

I guess that by replacing the one drive, the bootloader also got removed as the bootloader resides on the primary harddisk of your computer (unless you specify otherwise with the advanced options)

 

In order to get a bootloader working on your system, open the Control Center (MCC aka "configure your system), go to the system-startup section and define the boot methos with the wizard. Select grub as bootloader and let it install on your primary harddisks Master Boot Record/MBR (probably hd0 or hd1). If you do that, it can be that prior boot-entries will not be "adopted" by Mandriva (e.g. dual-boot linux systems) and will ned manual fixing. This is however not hard at all and we can assist you in that.

 

After the installation of Grub is done, you can check if it was successful my taking a look at the /boot/grub/menu.lst file. If it is there and if there are some okay looking boot-etnries (harddisk definitions), then it should work. If you run into problems or need a more detailed explanation of how to do it, please give us the output of some terminal commands, too (=open e.g. Konsole or gnome.terminal).

 

fdisk -l

will list all partitions on your system

 

cat /boot/grub/menu.lst

will show the contents of the menu.lst file

 

Just a note: You won't see any data on the bootdisk by default as bootmanagers are installed on the MBR, not on "normal partitions" of computers or floppies. That means that they reside at the start of the drive, before any other partition.

 

Good luck. :)

[Guest bob506]

Hi Arctic,

 

Your suggestions have worked for me, I was able to fix my problem and now have my computer booting from the hard disk. In the Boot Loader tool of the MCC, I had to try a few different partitions as the boot device, before I got one to work, which in the end was the /dev/hda. This must be my primary hard disk.

 

At one point I did get into some difficulty, when just the grub prompt appeared and the booting stopped. Luckly I had the lines from the /etc/grub/menu.lst file written down in note book from an incident last year. When I typed that in it booted up ok.

 

Thanks again for your help