[TriLUG] Grub boot problem

William Sutton william at trilug.org
Sun Apr 16 01:42:15 EDT 2006


I have one.  I presume the date is Saturday's since I went through the 
grub setup process to get material to paste into this email...

For what it's worth, here's the info:

-----
# ls -l /boot/grub/stage2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 108296 Apr 15 19:18 /boot/grub/stage2
# md5sum /boot/grub/stage2
65f83401414500f58bf0ae036493cb18  /boot/grub/stage2
-----

-- 
William Sutton


On Sun, 16 Apr 2006, Rodney Radford wrote:

> 
> Stage 2 of grub, which follows after stage 1.5, is obviously not loading, and I suspect the error #17 is EEXIST (from errno.h) stating the stage2 bootloader file is missing.
> 
> When you boot with the livecd, check and see if you have a /boot/grub/stage2 file present on your system. Perhaps it was somehow trashed/deleted.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> >From: William Sutton <william at trilug.org>
> >Sent: Apr 15, 2006 11:52 PM
> >To: trilug at trilug.org
> >Subject: [TriLUG] Grub boot problem
> >
> >I tried irc.freenode.net #grub (twice) and nobody responded, so to the 
> >trilug list I come...
> >
> >Please bear with me as I'm trying to be as specific and detailed at the 
> >outset as possible to give a clear picture of what's happening.  Since I'm 
> >not an expert on this, there may be a lot of useless data here.
> >
> >I have a system running Gentoo 2005.1, with all recent updates.  Last 
> >Sunday, I attempted to run xcdroast as root (it refused to run as a user 
> >or under sudo...we can address that later, so no flames, please).  It 
> >locked the system (X refused to respond, keyboard Num Lock refused to 
> >respond, remote login to kill the process was useless in that login was 
> >allowed but kill, reboot, even init 0 responded with errors).
> >
> >I powered the system off, and powered it back on.
> >
> >It came up and said
> >
> >-----
> >GRUB _
> >-----
> >
> >and sat there doing nothing.
> >
> >So I rebooted it (actually, the keyboard refused to respond again, so I 
> >went through the manual power cycle process).  I popped in my Gentoo 
> >2005.1 livecd, mounted everything, and ran fsck on all the disks.  Aside 
> >from a large number of inodes freed, it passed muster.
> >
> >Before I go further, here's the output of fdisk -l:
> >
> >-----
> >Disk /dev/hda: 3240 MB, 3240646656 bytes
> >15 heads, 63 sectors/track, 6697 cylinders
> >Units = cylinders of 945 * 512 = 483840 bytes
> >
> >   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> >/dev/hda1   *           1         217      102501   83  Linux
> >/dev/hda2             218        6697     3061800   83  Linux
> >
> >Disk /dev/sda: 9139 MB, 9139200000 bytes
> >255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1111 cylinders
> >Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> >
> >   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> >/dev/sda1               1         261     2096451   82  Linux swap / Solaris
> >/dev/sda2             262        1111     6827625   83  Linux
> >
> >Disk /dev/sdb: 36.7 GB, 36703918080 bytes
> >255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4462 cylinders
> >Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> >
> >   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> >/dev/sdb1               1         653     5245191   83  Linux
> >/dev/sdb2             654        4462    30595792+  83  Linux
> >-----
> >
> >and the corresponding mounts from mount:
> >
> >-----
> >/dev/sdb2 on / type ext3 (rw)
> >/dev/sdb1 on /usr type ext3 (rw)
> >/dev/sda2 on /home type ext3 (rw)
> >/dev/hda1 on /boot type ext2 (rw)
> >/dev/hda2 on /var type ext3 (rw)
> >none on /proc type proc (rw,nodiratime)
> >-----
> >
> >To verify that I have the right disks for the next thing I wanted to do, I 
> >checked /boot/grub/device.map:
> >
> >-----
> >(fd0)	/dev/fd0
> >(hd0)	/dev/hda
> >(hd1)	/dev/sda
> >(hd2)	/dev/sdb
> >-----
> >
> >Now then...the next thing I did was to manually re-setup grub on the first 
> >MBR of all disks (NB, it doesn't show here, but when I ran grub, there 
> >were an awful lot of error messages about fd0; more on those later):
> >
> >-----
> >grub> root (hd0,0)
> > Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
> >
> >grub> setup (hd0)
> > Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... yes
> > Checking if "/boot/grub/stage2" exists... yes
> > Checking if "/boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes
> > Running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)"...  16 sectors are embedded.
> >succeeded
> > Running "install /boot/grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+16 p (hd0,0)/boot/grub/stage2 /boot/grub/menu.lst"... succeeded
> >Done.
> >
> >grub> setup (hd1)
> > Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... yes
> > Checking if "/boot/grub/stage2" exists... yes
> > Checking if "/boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes
> > Running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd1)"...  16 sectors are embedded.
> >succeeded
> > Running "install /boot/grub/stage1 d (hd1) (hd1)1+16 p (hd0,0)/boot/grub/stage2 /boot/grub/menu.lst"... succeeded
> >Done.
> >
> >grub> setup (hd2)
> > Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... yes
> > Checking if "/boot/grub/stage2" exists... yes
> > Checking if "/boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes
> > Running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd2)"...  16 sectors are embedded.
> >succeeded
> > Running "install /boot/grub/stage1 d (hd2) (hd2)1+16 p (hd0,0)/boot/grub/stage2 /boot/grub/menu.lst"... succeeded
> >Done.
> >-----
> >
> >looks ok to me, other than the messages previously mentioned.
> >
> >I rebooted.  This time it came up and stated that it was loading Grub 
> >stage 1.5.  So far so good...until I saw the following (from memory):
> >
> >-----
> >Grub
> >Error 17
> >-----
> >
> >Nothing beyond "Error 17".  I googled all over the place but didn't find 
> >anything that helped me in particular.  So for giggles I decided to do a 
> >grub-install --recheck to see if everything was OK.
> >
> >-----
> ># grub-install --recheck /dev/hda
> >Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.
> >end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0
> >end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0
> >Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 0
> >end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0
> >Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 0
> >ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide
> >hdc: No disk in drive
> >hdc: No disk in drive
> >end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0
> >end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0
> >end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0
> >Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 0
> >end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0
> >Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 0
> >-----
> >
> >Wow.  All of the fd0 error messages I saw when I initially ran grub.  
> >Here's a problem, though:  grub goes through its errors and then gives me 
> >an interface to work in.  grub-install, which should give me some sort of 
> >status, just keeps spitting these errors out.  I have to CTRL+C to get out 
> >of it.
> >
> >I can mount it off the livecd (which it presently is), so it's not 
> >hopeless for retrieving data off of, but this situation has me bothered.  
> >Optimally, I'd like to get it back up and booting properly.  Failing that, 
> >I'd like some sort of advice as to what to do (older SCSI drives, older 
> >IDE drive, etc).
> >
> >So....can anyone help me? :)
> >
> >-- 
> >William Sutton
> >-- 
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> 
> 



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