Geneticus Posted November 14, 2006 Report Share Posted November 14, 2006 Hi! I'm having some issues that have me stumped. I'm not a first time user, but I'm pretty close to being a newb. I have an older box that I wanted to task as a web/file server and play with the win32 game support among with some other things. my HW is as follows: Asus TUSL2-C mainboard ati Radeon 9800 Maxtor 40gb hdd PRI MAST /dev/hda WDC 40gb hdd PRI SLAVE /dev/hdb w/ntfs partition(web files from old server) Plextor CD burner SEC MAST Celeron 1.2ghz 512mb RAM PC 100 Promise FastTrack 2 ata Raid Controller(removed in troubleshooting) Sil 3112 SATARaid controller with no drives currently connected 2 NICs I started with a Gentoo install and manually configured the conf, when I booted all I got was an infinite loop of GRUB GRUB GRUB filling the screen after rebooting. I reran the install with LILO and got L 20 20 20 20 wich repeats for about 10 lines then hangs. after some searching I saw some posts from people who had had the GRUB problem and resolved it by turning off BIOS drive auto detect. tried it and no effect. I then found a page on LILO problems and saw that the repeating 20 was indicitave of bad hardware. I then downloaded the Mandriva 2007 power user dist. and ran the install. I was able to reboot to the hdd after the files were copied over to complete the install. after rebooting I got the LILO problem again. I re ran again allowing the installer to set up the partitions, no change. I scaned the maxtor drive with the maxtor diags and did a low level format. same problem I then re-ran setup again and this time I chose to write the bootloader to the the NTFS drive in the emty space at teh beginning of the drive. same problem. Since the drive passed the diags including a stress test, My gut is telling me that I am having an issue with the BIOS and LILO/GRUB but so far no changes have been sucessfull. Any thoughts? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted November 14, 2006 Report Share Posted November 14, 2006 A few things off the top of my head that I would try. First, remove the SATA raid controller if it's a PCI card, or otherwise disable it in your bios setup. Second, Western Digital has been known to not play nice with drives from other manufacturers. Disconnect the WD drive and see if the problem goes away. If it does, try reconnecting the drive on the secondary ide channel. Third, check your jumpering on both drives and make sure you have it right. Check your bios setup to make sure it's OK. Fourth, run the WD hard drive diagnostics on the WD drive and make sure it's OK. One bad drive on an ide channel can cause problems for the other good drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Geneticus Posted November 14, 2006 Author Report Share Posted November 14, 2006 pulled the raid card and wd drive. rescue console won't let me re assign the bootloader to hda1. Is there a way I can do it from the rescue console? things seem to be in slightly different places than they were in gentoo. or is there a tiny version of linux I can install to a hdd to test with? I'm trying to avoid 1 1/2hr reinstall between TS steps.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted November 14, 2006 Report Share Posted November 14, 2006 rescue console won't let me re assign the bootloader to hda1. grub-install /dev/hda1 (you may have to wait quite a bit, possibly 3-4 minutes!) I'm sorry, I've not used lilo since ages, so I can't recall how it's done there, but there must be something similar. Finally I'd suggest (since installing the bootloader at MBR fails for you) installing grub as a secondary bootloader (to /dev/hdx as suggested) and using something like GaG ( gag.sourceforge.net ) as primary bootloader. For some cryptic reason, GaG has worked for me in the rather few instances grub failed to install to MBR. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Geneticus Posted November 14, 2006 Author Report Share Posted November 14, 2006 (edited) [root@rescue /]# grub-install /dev/hda1 I get an error: mkdir: cannot create directory `/boot' : File exists Like I said I'm pretty much a newb when it comes to linux. About all I know how do do is use ls, cd and nano I tried to just run grub. I got into it but when I did setup (hd0) I got: Error 15: File not found I'm guessing it's because there is no grub.conf, but I don't know what text editor is available at the rescue console to create one. Since the rescue gui is trying to reinstall lilo to /dev/hdb when there is no hdb in the system couldn't I edit wherever that path is stored and change it to /dev/hda? Just need to know what editor to use and where the data is stored..... Edited November 14, 2006 by Geneticus Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Geneticus Posted November 14, 2006 Author Report Share Posted November 14, 2006 After I realized that I was doing things the lazy slow way I decided to poke around in the case again. I moved the drives around so that: hda is PRI MAST hdb is SEC MAST CDR is SEC SLAVE was able to boot into the first boot wizard. Wizard? sounds like the OS I'm trying to get away from. Warlock, Witch, Magician even.... ah well thanks for motivating me to solve my own problem :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.