FC2 Frist boot after clean Install
Lonnie Santella
lonniesantella at hotmail.com
Tue Jun 22 16:44:02 UTC 2004
Heres a quick review of my environment:
(1) Always a COMPLETELY clean install using Drive Image utility to erase
all partitions and restore MBR.
(2) Two machines, both Asus P4 clones with 1 GB RAM, and 1 Western Digital
20 GB hard drive each.
(3) Both machines have subsequently loaded Redhat 9.0 and ran flawlessly
no problems at all.
(4) I have two different ISO image CDs from two different mirrors both
with verified MD5Sums and both producing the exact same problem each time.
So Ive been trying to install FC2 Ive just finished my 11th attempt.
Following the advice of different threads and release notes, I always go
back to a fresh install before trying anything new.
To minimize variables, I keep the install as simple as possible. I choose
Automatic Partition, which creates a 100MB /boot on hda1, a 17GB /
(root) on hda2, and a 2GB swap on hda3. I also choose a minimal install to
eliminate possible variables from the other CDs this way I only have to
use CD1.
Each time, the install itself is flawless. But after the first reboot and
naturally each time thereafter, immediately following the POST, I get a
black screen with the word GRUB in the upper left corner. No response to
keyboard strokes or mouse movement at that point.
I have to rule out hardware since this problem with FC2, I have
successfully installed and ran RedHat 9.0 and FreeBSD 4.10. I always use a
tried and true utility to erase the hard drives of all partitions and
restore MBR before installing anything new. This guarantees a pristine
physical drive during the install.
I compared the grub.conf files on each machine after the FC2 install. They
are identical. No big surprise there I guess. Then, just for further
comparison, I isolated one machine and wiped it clean, and loaded RedHat
9.0. Then I compared its grub.conf to that of the FC2 install. Almost
identical except for the / (root) and swap partitions. In each case the
/boot partition is always the first (hda1). In FC2, the / root partition
is the second one (hda2) followed but the swap on hda3. But in RedHat 9.0,
the swap is on hda2, followed by the / root on hda3. No big deal there, the
grub.conf files compensate for this but looking to hda2 on FC2 and hda3 on
RedHat 9.0 as one would expect.
Both grub.conf files from FC2 and RedHat 9.0 list an entry as follows:
Root (hd0,0)
Im not sure if having different root partitions should affect this or
not, but its the same in both OSs.
One other thing I thought was odd is that on both machines, the standard FC2
install puts a strange format or partition table on the physical drive; so
much so that it takes a few extreme steps to wipe the partition info off the
drive. Normally I would just use the delete function of the utility, which
works for all the RedHat dirstros and FreeBSD but in FC2 it generates and
error stating that it cant delete the partition. I have to use a utility
called bigfdisk then put a dos partition on it, then delete the dos
partition to get everything set back to a completely empty hard drive.
Id really like to give FC2 a test run been looking forward to it. Ive
read the release notes, and browsed for two solid days through news threads
and docs. Im stuck, could you please help me out here?
Thanks in advance,
Lonnie
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