fedora boot problem (grub?)

[Mike McCarty]

Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Alex @ Avantel Systems wrote:
> 
> 
>>Although my bios recognized my scsi disks, my Fedora install needed me to
>>load
>>drivers manually otherwise the scsi disks were not found.  After that, the
>>install completes without further problems.  I asked that grub be used and
>>installed on the mbr.
>>
>>After reboot I get "Operating System not found".
>>
>>Using linux rescue (again with noprobe so I can load the driver), I tried
>>rewriting to the boot sector and although grub claims success, the results
>>are the same - can't boot.  I've tried copying stage 1&2 to a floppy to
>>make it do the boot but I get a grub prompt after stage 2 is loaded.
>>
>>The driver I needed during install is listed in modprobe.conf (aic7xxx)
>>and I have tried re-creating initrd in various configurations
>>(--preload=aic7xxx, --omit-raid-modules, etc) all with the same result -
>>can't boot
> 
> 
> I would have thought this error message meant the machine
> was not reading the MBR,
> and that the solution lay in the BIOS settings.

That message is displayed by the MBR.

> The alternative is that you have not actually installed grub
> on the correct disk.

Or into one of the partitions, instead of into the MBR.

> I'm no boot expert, but as I understand it
> the machine has to read the MBR _before_ it loads kernel or driver.

That's exactly right.

I've written a little tutorial which, if there is interest, I could
post here. I originally composed it for the Debian user's group.

But it's really OS independent (mostly).

> Incidentally, I would install grub with "grub-install --recheck /dev/sda"
> or even try running grub interactively,
> to make sure it understands your disk setup.

Mike
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