My Machine Won't Boot

[Mike McCarty]

Rejean Proulx wrote:
> 
>> Rejean Proulx wrote:
>>
>>> I reinstalled my entire system and now have a kernel and grub, but 
>>> the machine won't get passed the device listing. It is as if it can't 
>>> figure out where to boot from. The boot order is correct in the bios. 
>>> It is as if there is no MBR on /dev/sda? Any suggestions?
>>
>>
>> Yes, you may not have installed GRUB properly. The MBR is a physical
>> location on disc, so there IS an MBR there, perhaps not a valid one.
>> For the BIOS to load it, the last two bytes must be 0x55 0xAA (I
>> forget the order). I can't tell from what you wrote exactly what
>> the symptoms are. Could you please tell us what hapens when you try
>> to boot? Does GRUB execute at all? If it does, what does it
>> put on the screen?
> 
> First it gets by the part where it wants delete for bios, then control-s 
> for raid utility.
> 
> Then it gives a long list of devices. It stops. Grub doesn't seem to 
> come up at all.

A long list of devices. I suppose this is your BIOS still running.

I'd guess you don't have a valid MBR, perhaps nothing written to it
at all. Do you have your rescue CDROM? Try booting from that, and
hex dumping your MBR. Also, can you provide us with what fdisk -l
has to say?

> How do I make a grub floppy?

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub-faq.en.html#q4

This presumes you can boot somewhere. You need somthing you
can boot before you can create a boot floppy. I presume you
are using some computer to access the mail list. Perhaps
you can use that one to make the boot floppy.

Mike
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