[TriLUG] HELP! FC2 install on Thinkpad fails to boot.

[Ralph Blach]

Frankly,

I find lilo easier to understand.  All though not as flexible as grup,
it is does what I need it to do

Try and use lilo

Chip

Rick DeNatale wrote:

>My wife has an orphaned Thinkpad A21e on which Win98 got clobbered.
>Since we don't have any Win98 CDs I decided to install Linux on it. 
>I'm having problems getting it to boot after the install.
>
>FIrst off, this machine's only network interface is a wi-fi card,
>which I expect I'm going to have fun dealing with AFTER I get Linux
>installed, so network installation doesn't seem to be a viable option.
>
>My first thought was to use the Fedora Core 2 disk which I picked up a
>this month's meeting. However, since the TP only has a cd drive, and I
>can't figure out how to make cd images from the DVD I needed to go to
>plan b.
>
>I had the DVD from the August Linux Format magazine, which does have a
>means of creating isos using jigdo.  So I made all five cd's. The
>magazine did have a sidebar which said that media check wouldn't work
>on these, and it doesn't.
>
>So I plunged ahead.  First I did a workstation install. When it
>finally completed though, rather than booting I got a "Missing
>Operating System" message.  I tried again, and it was the same story.
>
>Playing with the rescue disk, I couldn't find a kernel nor grub?!?
>
>Googling came up with some suggestions to change bios settings to make
>sure that the disk was lba format, but this machine doesn't seem to
>have any bios settings relevant to the disk.
>
>I also ran across someone with a similar problem who said that after
>he installed a minimal system he could boot, and then re-install a
>fuller system successfully. So I installed the minimal FC2 config, and
>voila, it booted. Then I tried to upgrade the installation.
>
>But the upgrade option only seems to do version upgrades, no options
>to add more packages. So I tried to install over the same partitions.
>
>This left me with a system which booted to a grub prompt.  Not knowing
>that much about grub, I found some documentation and tried to get it
>to boot, but no luck. I thought that maybe I needed a bigger /boot
>partition, so I'm now trying to re-install with a bigger one, but
>thought I'd ask y'all for ideas.
>
>Looking at what had been installed I found that /boot contained
>  initrd-2.6.5-1.358.img
>  vmlinuz-2.6.5-1.358
>  System.map-2.6.5-1.358  - or something like that, I didn't note the
>exact file name
>  rhinstall-stage2.2.6.5-1.358.img again I didn't note the exact file name.
>
>/boot/grub contained only splash.xpm.gz  
>
>I Looking at the setup on my RH9 box, I mistakenly COPIED the vmlinuz
>and initrd files to /boot/grub.
>I then ran grub with that configuration and got
>grub>root (hd0,0)
>   response that this was e2fs
>grub>find /vmlinuz-2.6.5-1.358
>   (hd0,0)
>grub>find /initrd-2.6.5-1.358.img
>   (hd0,0)
>grub>quit
>
> I then made a /boot/grub/grub.conf which looked like this:
>
>default=0
>timeout=10
>splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
>title Fedora Core 2 (2.6.5-1.358)
>          root (hd0,0)
>          kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.5-1.358
>          initrd /initrd-2.6.5-1.358.img
>
>Then I tried to boot, and it now just displays
>GRUB
>in the upper left corner of the screen and doesn't seem to be
>listening to the keyboard.
>
>I then thought that maybe the rhinstall-stage2* file needed to be in
>/boot/grub since there are some other stage2 files there on my RH9
>system. When I tried to cp it, I ran out of space on the boot
>partition, which made me think that just maybe that's the problem, so
>now I'm reinstalling as I said above.  Of course, I really don't need
>the initrd and syslinuz files in /boot/grub...
>
>But if that's NOT the problem, does anyone have any other ideas?
>  
>


-- 
Ralph "Chip" Blach
rcblach at blach.dnsalias.org
rblach at intrex.net