[TriLUG] Grub boot problem

Rodney Radford rradford at mindspring.com
Sun Apr 16 01:32:34 EDT 2006 

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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