Arch installed but GRUB doesn't load
 

I installed Arch 2010.5 and the installation went flawlessly, not a single error message. But when I rebooted, GRUB did not load. Just a blank screen with a blinking cursor. I cannot input anything. I'm sure I followed the installation instructions correctly, and I don't know what could be wrong.

The installation should be on (hd1,0). [(hd0,0) is going to be windows eventually but it's not my top priority and BIOS is instructed to boot hd1 (sdb) first.] If I boot from the Live USB drive I used for the installation, I can select "Boot Existing OS" and tell it to boot "hd1 0" at the prompt, but then I just get "Booting..." and the blinking cursor that does nothing.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Hey there!

Let's see what's in the /boot/grub/menu.lst.

There's a comprehensive read, look for the entry that reads "Configure /boot/grub/menu.lst for this computer"...

By the way, great choice of distro, once up and running, you will love it.

I did...

Thor

Maybe this is irrelavent, but the first time I tried installing Arch it didn't work becasue I installed GRUB to a partition (/dev/sda1) indtead of the drive (/dev/sda).

I thought I might have done that, so when I retried the installation I was very careful to check what the instructions said and install to the drive, not a partition.

Unfortunately, I can't get at it, because I can't boot the computer. I didn't change any of whatever the Arch installer put in the menu.lst file and I can't remember it perfectly, but I'm pretty sure it was aiming at (hd1,0) for Arch Linux. I checked that specifically during the installation.

What you can do is use the install cd and mount the /boot partition - or whatever partition /boot is on - and retrieve the file that way.
Any other LiveCD works just as well, of course.

The menu.lst entries:

??
A thought . When you partitioned the drive was there an error or maybe a mistake ( it happens )

with booting from the Arch dvd after you "chroot /mnt/sysimage" run
and see just where the "*" is sdb1 should be bootable

output of `fdisk -l`:

Did you check the uuid to see if it is correct? Use the live CD, open a terminal and run blkid and compare the output for sdb1 to your menu.lst entry.

Try the geometry command from Grub. In a terminal as root just type grub to get the grub prompt then type geometry (hd1) - (hit enter to get output).

Do you not have your other drive currently attached?
Did you have it attached during the installation of Arch?

it is possible that grub is on the mbr of the first disk ( default)
hd0,0

try that in grub .If it works then when you install MS Win7 you will need to reinstall grub

Does the geometry command include the "-"?

The other drive is attached, and was attached when I installed Arch. Maybe that got GRUB confused. I'm wondering about detaching the other drive and reinstalling to see if that makes a difference.

The other drive will have Windows 7 on it, but that hasn't been installed. I'm wondering whether I should install that first, detach it, install Arch, reattach everything, and edit GRUB's menu.lst.

Yes. Otherwise the application wouldn't be able to tell it apart from, for example, filenames given to it.

And it's not a "command", it's an "option".

If you are referring to my last post, no the - is not included in the command. As I indicated, go to a terminal in a live CD as root enter:

grub

That should give you the grub prompt which looks like this: grub>

here you would type: geometry (hd0) That is a number zero not a Letter O.
After getting the output, repeat the process and change the (hd0) to (hd1) if you have both drives attached.

The Grub manual refers to geometry as a command, Section 13.3.13?

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/man...gacy/grub.html

For some reason I was thinking of the "-geometry" option for X11 applications.