need help with grub

[jwebster8]

ok, I upgraded my kubuntu on friday, but the upgrade spat out a lot of errors, so I decided that it would be better to just do a complete install from scratch.

The install went fine, but when I restarted grub hung up at boot (invalid device or something)

my partitions look like this
/dev/sda1 *boot fat32 Dell Utility (the computer came from dell and this a small partition setup by them)
/dev/sda2 NTFS (this is my windows partition)
/dev/sdb1 NTFS (this is a second hard drive with work files)
/dev/sdc1 ext3 /boot (this is where my grub and linux kernals are)
/dev/sdc5 swap
/dev/sdc6 ext3 / (main linux partition)
/dev/sdc7 ext3 /home (partition for my home files)

Now here is my problem, at boot, grub fails before it gets to the screen where I can choose the OS that I want, and type 'c' to get into the grub editor, so I have to boot from my rescue CD

when I do that I try to follow the directions found at
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GrubHowto
under the section Backup, Repairing and Reinstalling GRUB - command line

my problem seems to be with the find command in grub

grub> find /boot/grub/stage1

this returns Error 15 file not found, which makes sense because I booted from a CD and the /boot directory isn't the one that I actually want to modify...right?

so I mount sdc1 to /media/boot and if I cd there, grub and the kernals and everything are there
so I go back into grub and reissue the find command as

grub> find /media/boot/grub/stage1

But that still returns the Error 15: File not found !!!!!

but the file is there, I can look at it, edit it, etc...

what's going on here? what am i doing wrong?


I'm going nuts

[mhauber]

Re: need help with grub

Try to run grub as root ('sudo grub') and see if you can get the disk/boot info that way.

hth

MHauber

[toad]

Re: need help with grub

An easy peasy approach to this would be download super grub disk (do a quick google) and boot off that. It should find all of your operating systems and you _should_ be able to boot them all. Once you have ascertained that, simply reinstall grub with it...

However, the interesting question is how far in the boot process you get. The BIOS runs alright I gather, but then your info gets a bit foggy...

[jwebster8]

Re: need help with grub

mhauber: I was running it as root

toad: I'll try the grub disk and see what happens

It dies at
grub loading stage 1.5 error 2

[aged hippy]

Re: need help with grub

It dies at
grub loading stage 1.5 error 2

You mean the Grub disc itself won't load?

[jwebster8]

Re: need help with grub

yeah, the only way i could run grub was to boot from the live cd and run it from a command line.

Its like the /boot partition wasn't being found

[aged hippy]

Re: need help with grub

The Grub error is:

14.3 Errors reported by the Stage 2

The general way that the Stage 2 handles errors is to abort the operation in question, print an error string, then (if possible) either continue based on the fact that an error occurred or wait for the user to deal with the error.

The following is a comprehensive list of error messages for the Stage 2 (error numbers for the Stage 1.5 are listed before the colon in each description):

1 : Filename must be either an absolute filename or blocklist
This error is returned if a file name is requested which doesn't fit the syntax/rules listed in the Filesystem.
2 : Bad file or directory type
This error is returned if a file requested is not a regular file, but something like a symbolic link, directory, or FIFO.

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/man...1_002e5-errors

How far have you actually got, can you boot from the Grub CD?

[jwebster8]

Re: need help with grub

wait...no, i read your post wrong, the grub disk loaded fine, and it worked actually!

I've got it working at the moment and i'm happy. Thanks Toad

it was the grub that kubuntu installed that wasn't working right, and I'm at a loss as to why it wasn't working

I've never had the boot loader not work before

[aged hippy]

Re: need help with grub

It can probably be fixed from the Grub disk, and i know i won't be too popular for suggesting this but my inclination would be to re-install, as it would be much quicker.

When you installed, did you let Grub put itself where it wanted to go, or tell it to install the boot-loader elsewhere?

[jwebster8]

Re: need help with grub

Summary so far

When I used the super grub disk, I chose the option to automatically search for grub directories and use the existing config/menu files.

it found the /boot partition and loaded the grub files found there, which implies to me that the files written there were ok

so does this mean that the bootloader grub installed on the mbr of hd0 was bad?

I dont know, if it weren't my work computer, i'd be inclined to reload the os and troubleshoot the problem some more, but as it is, i can't afford to do that at the moment.

[jwebster8]

Re: need help with grub

It can probably be fixed from the Grub disk, and i know i won't be too popular for suggesting this but my inclination would be to re-install, as it would be much quicker.

When you installed, did you let Grub put itself where it wanted to go, or tell it to install the boot-loader elsewhere?

when i ran the kubuntu installer, it never asked me a question about grub.

I chose to manually partition, because I wanted to preserve my /home partition. But that was pretty straight forward.


So yeah, the super grub disk worked, maybe the grub that shipped with intrepid is buggy, seems unlikely, but i can't explain it otherwise.

[aged hippy]

Re: need help with grub

To be honest, you would be better off if someone with more knowledge could guide you, i'm happy to crucify my own system, but i would hate to do it to someone else's

It does sound to me as though the boot-loader was looking in the wrong place for some reason.

[aged hippy]

Re: need help with grub

You mentioned a /boot partition, did you create this?

Or do you mean the partition which it boots from?

Edit:
... and how did you manually partition?

[toad]

Re: need help with grub

Okay, let SGD repair your grub. Why the Kubuntu version didn't install it correctly I have no idea. Perhaps you hit the jackpot

Or Qqmike, the local grub guru has an idea/heard of it before?

[jwebster8]

Re: need help with grub

You mentioned a /boot partition, did you create this?

Or do you mean the partition which it boots from?

Edit:
... and how did you manually partition?

basically I was just preserving the partitions that I've used for about 5 years now.

I have all my linux partitions on one hard drive (on my system it's sdc).
sdc1 is set to mount at /boot
sdc5 is set as the swap
sdc6 is set to mount at /
and sdc7 is set to mount at /home

I was thinking that the mbr on hd0 wasn't finding the /boot partition, but if that were the case, why would the error thrown be Error 2 on stage 1.5? wouldn't that imply that it got through stage 1?