Dual Boot Problem

Jonathan Berry berryja at gmail.com
Wed Jun 15 03:48:44 UTC 2005


On 6/14/05, Jessie Veltman <sassnak at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/14/05, Jim Cornette <fc-cornette at insight.rr.com> wrote:
> > Jessie Veltman wrote:
> > >Ok I looked at both device.map and fdisk -l.
> > >For device.map I came up with:
> > >(fd0) /dev/fd0
> > >(hd0) /dev/hda
> > >(hd1) /dev/hdb
> > >(hd2) /dev/hdg
> > >
> > >and for fdisk -l I came up with:
> > >Device      Boot   Start  End    Blocks             ID    System
> > >/dev/hda1     *      1       14946  120053713+    7     HPFS/NTFS
> > >/dev/hdb1     *      1       13       1049391         83     Linux
> > >/dev/hdb2            14      14946  119949322+   8e     Linux
> > >/dev/hdg1     *      1        19457  156288321     c       w95 Fat32 (LBA)
> > >/dev/hdi1      *      1        9729    78148161      c        w95 Fat32 (LBA)
> >
> > It looks like /dev/hda, /dev/hdb and /dev/hdg are alright. Is this
> > /dev/hdi the SATA device? I take it that you have a /boot partition on
> > hdb1 and everything else is in an LVM on hdb2.
> >
> > I see that all of your drives have an active partition. I have had
> > problems with not enough active partitions, but not too many. (Black /w
> > grub with some error w/o the partiton with grub installed set to active.)
> > Could it be that your BIOS boots the SATA (/dev/hdi) first and Linux
> > sees it last? Just out of curiousity, can you install grub to /dev/hdi
> > using grub-install.
> > If what was discussed about the beauty of using LABEL vs. /dev/hdx
> > entries in /etc/fstab, linux should get things right once grub is
> > recognized at boot.
> >
> > I'm on a hit or miss mode now. This is just a shot while my eyes are closed.
> >
> > Jim
> >
> /dev/hdi is actually not a SATA drive. When I was fiddling with this a
> couple hours ago I switched it to IDE, so I have no SATA drives. Using
> "grub-install /dev/hda --recheck" I am getting it to try and boot grub
> now (yay!) but it is giving me "error 17". I looked it up via google
> but I have no idea why its giving me that error.

Well, this is progress and that is good :).  My guess is that GRUB is
still confused about which drive it wants.  The error 17 means that
GRUB finds the partition, but cannot recognize the filesystem.  This
probably means it is trying to read the NTFS partition, which is hda1.
 Either that or it is somehow looking at hdb2 instead of hdb1.  What
is partition type 8e?  Is it an LVM?
With complicated setups like you have, it can be hard to figure out
the actual disk order that the BIOS assigns.  What does your
device.map file contain now?  What hard drives do you have hooked up? 
What are the contents of /boot/grub/grub.conf ?
One other thing to try.  Since you mentioned GAG, you can install GRUB
in your boot partition and use GAG to chain to GRUB (I think, never
dealt with GAG).  Do the same thing with the rescue CD and chroot and
try this command:

grub-install /dev/hdb1

Then try to use GAG to chain to GRUB.  I think not having GRUB in the
boot sector is the problem you were having before with GAG.  Or, if
you have a floppy drive, you can make a grub floppy faily easily (I
think you can do a cd image too, but I haven't done that).  With that
we could possibly do some diagnostics to see how GRUB sees your
drives.
Oh, and just for the record (since it isn't stated explicitly yet in
the thread), this is FC4 i386, right?

Jonathan




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