grub read error

[squash]

I have built a system out of many used parts, all working.
the HD came from a previous Redhat system I had and was working fine. It was not the boot disk but a mounted backup disk.
Now I am attempting to install Red Hat Linux 7.2 on this new system from scratch.
Boot from CD (Red Hat originals).
go thru entire install process, no problems.
then when finished it says remove cd and reboot.
When I do I get the following:
complete black screen with the following message at the top.

GRUB Read Error


I have searched the net and every single reference is for dual boot machines and how to fix the MBR with NT or other windows product.
I do not have any other OS or filesystem on this drive.

Any clues how to fix this.

I can boot from the CD and get to "linux rescue" but the grub.conf files seems ok.
I have looked at it before on other systems and it looks the same.

Any suggestions.
Thankx

As always we thank you for your support
Doug

 

[thedaver]

Perhaps what you have is an actual drive incompatibility at the BIOS?? Perhaps linux shouldn't have ever installed, but I'm wondering if your BIOS, ATA/SATA are not truly happy with each other? Perhaps your mobo/BIOS have a setting that's not 'auto' - where the IDE drive is being profiled for a number of sectors that doesn't match the real drive geometry? Perhaps the bootable CD can deal with it???

I'm kind of guessing, but it sounds like the first few secters of the boot sequence are read and then it goes to pot...

Alternatively, you might have bad sectors somewhere that grub is reading to bring up init...

What does fdisk say about the drive if you boot from cd?

D.E.R. Management - IT Project Management Consulting

http://www.dermanagement.com/

 

[geirendre]

From the GRUB manual:
14.1 Errors reported by the Stage 1
Read Error
A disk read error happened while trying to read the stage2 or stage1.5.

So the MBR (grub stage 1) was read succesfully and executed,
it then tries to read stage2 from the disk with information it found in the MBR,
but when trying to read stage2 from the disk, it couldn't find it.
Stage2 is what would have read your grub.conf file and displayed
the boot-menu. But it doesn't get that far.
Can you post the output of
fdisk -l
please? Do it as root BTW.

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html

 

[squash]

Well I have had this drive plugged in before, but to an older motherboard, It was /dev/hdb and worked just fine.
Same install version of red had.

from Bios

Pri Master SamSung SV3002H
IDE HDD [Auto Detect]

cap 30062 MB
cyl 58246
Head 16
Precomp 0
Landing zone 58245
Sector 63

Next I boot from CD: linux rescue

fdisk -l
disk /dev/hda: 255 heads 63 sectors 3654 cylinders
units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

device boot start end blocks id system
/dev/hda1 * 1 6 48163+ 83 linux
/dev/hda2 7 3524 28258335 83 linux
/dev/hda3 3525 3654 1044225 82 linux swap


Ok, Hardware is not my strong suit, but it looks like there is a difference between what bios thinks and what linux thinks the HD is. Am I correct in that assumption?

Now what?





As always we thank you for your support
Doug

 

[thedaver]

If you have moved the disk from /dev/hdb to /dev/hda then you need to maintain your grub.conf to ensure that your drive/init mappings are correct.

D.E.R. Management - IT Project Management Consulting

http://www.dermanagement.com/

 

[squash]

Pretty sure that took care of itself when I installed Red Hat.
I put this hardrive in the new (read different) case.
installed motherboard/CD rom/HD, etc.
installed Red Hat from orig CD.
choose the option to delete all partitions on the drive as part of the install.

anyway here is the jist of the grub.conf file on the HD

#boot=/dev/hda
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz

Title Red Hat Linux (2.4.7-10)

root (hd0,0)
kernal /vmlinuz-2.4.7-10 ro root=/dev/hda2 hdc=ide-scsi
initrd /initrd-2.4.7-10.img


Should I be concerned that the boot line is commented out?

As always we thank you for your support
Doug

 

[geirendre]

Well Pri Master IDE HDD is /dev/hda in Linux terminology,
as you probably know. So that's correct.
The number of heads and cylinders wary, bot don't think that's an issue.
Some questions:
1- Why do you want RH 7.2 innstaled, it's ca. 7 years old?
2- Where did you install GRUB? MBR (/dev/hda) or 1.partition (/dev/hda1)?

If you put it in /dev/hda1, try installing it in MBR with:

grub-install '(hd0)'[code]
You may need to use /dev/hda instead of hd0
Do it as user root.

3- Did you make a boot-floppy during the install, if so can you boot with it?

I presume you have the install guide???
[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-7.2-Manual/install-guide/[/URL]

 

[squash]

All great questions, let me take a shot at them.
Forgive my lack of knowlege if it shows.
I work with SUNOS at work a lot, but not on the hardware side much.

1- Why do you want RH 7.2 innstaled, it's ca. 7 years old?
Well basically I am cheap (read broke), I have this RH package on the shelf for couple of years to learn and play with it. So just continued down that path.

2- Where did you install GRUB? MBR (/dev/hda) or 1.partition (/dev/hda1)?
MBR /dev/hda was the choice on installation that I choose.
3- Did you make a boot-floppy during the install, if so can you boot with it?
No i did not make a boot floppy, do not have a floppy drive attatched, I have thought of adding one, re-installing and choose yes to make boot floopy, althought I bet there is a better way.
4-I presume you have the install guide???
Yes but so far I have read and read and read, no useful help so far there.



If you put it in /dev/hda1, try installing it in MBR with:

grub-install '(hd0)'[code]
You may need to use /dev/hda instead of hd0
Do it as user root.

I tried 
grub-install hd0
grub-install hd0,0
grub-install (hd0)
grub-install (hd0,0)

All same results, error for non-recognised dev

next
grub-install /dev/hda
completes successfully but same boot issue.

so maybe I need to remove from MBR and put on HD?
Not really sure how to do that.
As always I do appreciate the thougts.
Thankx




As always we thank you for your support
Doug

 

[geirendre]

Well with Linux, a tight budget need not meen that you
cant opt for a new and shining OS
Consider Fedora7 it's RedHat's community developed free OS, or
Centos it's in essens RHEL without RedHat branding and support.
Both can be downloaded for free from:

http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist

http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/isos/

More info on :

http://distrowatch.com/

Your grub.conf looks OK, and grub in /dev/hda is right...
One last question, you should have a device.map file in the
same directory as grub.conf (I think, not shure on RedHat)
Can you show the content of it?
And also the output of the command
mount
And can you locate where you have stage1.5 and stage2 files?
locate stage1.5
locate stage2
It's this stage2-file that the first part of grub cant find.

 

[squash]

device.map has
fd0 /dev/fd0
hd0 /dev/hda


mount command put an unexpected output because I am using "linux rescue"
but when I chroot to /mnt/sysimage it looks fine.
the locate command does not have DB setup and wont work.

Ok right on the verge of spending some precious money.
Yes I could go with newer OS, but hard to justify when I dont know that I have working hardware really.

gonna try one more motherboard, and reload OS. Probably later tonight.
Thankx again


As always we thank you for your support
Doug

 

[squash]

OK, a friend just brought over a different hd.
80GB WD
gonna try to reload, NO MBR this time.
Wish me luck


As always we thank you for your support
Doug

 

[squash]

OK, next update.
put 80 GB WD drive in case.
only HD in case.
complete install of RH linux
when it finished and attempted to boot from HD got error something like, no boot disk, please insert and reboot.

So next.
Put a floppy drive in the case.
boot from CD to linux rescue
chroot /mnt/sysimage
mkbootdisk 2.4.7-10

when that finished booted from floppy and boots fine.
What is up with my MBR not taking grub.
Man this is frustrating.
Why do I even need grub, I will NEVER have dual boot on this system, is there a way to put the bootimage on the mbr?

I will keep trying, really starting to suspect motherboard issue.
Thankx


As always we thank you for your support
Doug

 

[geirendre]

1- Did you install GRUB to /dev/hda ?

2- Did you choose the LBA option for the disk?

Think on this old OS you can get into a cylinder1024-problem
if you use a large disk like that.
Do you have the /boot partition within the first 1024 cylinders
of the disk?
fdisk -l
will show you that.

 

[thedaver]

If this research cycle craps out, I'm inclined to offer counsel that there are a ton of NEW, FREE and even lean distributions that should be used in lieu of RH 7.2.

Learning is best achieved when the system is working. It seems like you've spent days solving a problem that shouldn't occur in the wild when using a match of functioning hardware and a reasonably new distribution.

My $0.02USD.

D.E.R. Management - IT Project Management Consulting

http://www.dermanagement.com/

 

[squash]

Well, let see,
first I re-installed without choosing MBR and choosing /dev/hda to install grub.
That gave me error as above.
Next I reinstalled with MBR choice.
Same error.

thedaver, you bring up a very good point.
I have challenaged myself to figure this out, but alas seems like I am running in circles.
So I like your $.02, so next question.
Is how to get a newer version, free, set it up for install, then install it.

Is there a newer version of RH for free?, I will go look.
if that fruit does not bear then what is a good recomendation.

I like RH because it is the only linux I have actually played with up and running. Gnome was ok, but I am sortof more text based, although I see the merit in XTerm or X based applications.

I think it is time to throw in the towel and begin research on a newer version of Linux to play with.


As always we thank you for your support
Doug

 

[thedaver]

This forum is littered with recommendations and biases.. I recommend you walk through the history here and on the accompanying server forum.

http://www.tek-tips.com/threadminder.cfm?pid=54

http://www.distrowatch.com

is a nice way to get some feedback from lots of folks about many, many, many distributions...

In the Redhat space, there are a few product lines of "Free stuff"..

The Fedora project is the cutting-edge of the RedHat-modelled technologies. My experience is that they will nicely accomodate hardware identification - which may smooth your current situation. However, the distribution is kind of RAM/CPU needy by default...

Frankly, if you're going to use GNOME/KDE/XWindows from any recent distribution, you're going to need a min. of 512MB of RAM and a processor from the last 2-3 years to avoid going nuts on performance issues... Still a better deal than Windows by a long shot (hardware vs. performance/capabilites)... BUT, if wanted to run something on truly low-end hardware, you need to get a distribution that's specific to low-end hardware. Again distrowatch can advise you...

Further on the RedHat front, there is the CentOS project. This project takes the RedHat Enterprise line of distributions (which are fee-based) and (legally) trims out the proprietary RH support gunk/logos to return it to a free-support distro. Thus you get a highly-seasoned, stable distribution for free as well. CentOS/RHEL is NOT the cutting edge stuff and is probably more aligned towards providing a stable, server-focussed solution (i.e. command line) experience with support for considerably larger hardware configurations out of the box.... That might be a debateable statement, but hey it's a perspective.

I've also been toying with the Ubuntu family of products recently as part of some research to advocate linux to newbies. It's clearly as powerful as it is friendly. It anticipates the newbie configuration pains and makes some very reasonable default settings to get you started.

Again, the desktop install is a fairly resource needy platform because of the GUI stuff. Ubuntu is based upon Debian. Debian represnts a somewhat significant departure from some of the base tasks and maintenance activities that you will find under the RH line - predominatly so under package management and kernel updates.

If you have a preference for learning from your existing RH basis of knowledge, I would recommend you stay in the Fedora/CentOS distributions. Over time that experience will help you branch out to the Debians and other distributions that think a bit differently from RH approach.

Again, all of these are compared (along with dozens of others) both here and on distrowatch.

I think the point we're keen to make in your specific case is that you're trying to make a really old distribution behave with technology that it might not be suited to address. A newer distribution would quite likely resolve a number of your issues during its default install process.

OK?




D.E.R. Management - IT Project Management Consulting

http://www.dermanagement.com/

 

[squash]

Wow,
I think you hit it on the head. Sometimes seemingly trying to save ,time/money/learningcurve/etc, is not always what it seems.
I am downloading Fedora 7 live CD, I will play around with it.

Your insight is usefull and I will take a look at the other forum for increasing my own knowledge base.


As always we thank you for your support
Doug