Hi

I was installing some sun fire rack servers for a while back and i was getting these strange GRUB error codes after the installation had completed. I installed debian GNU/linux 3.1 sarge and it was set up to install the bootloader as normal on the MBR.

However, when booting the machine after installation i got the following error code "GRUB". It was only the word "GRUB" that was displayed on the screen and nothing else, no error code and no other text.

Ive searched google and i find a lot of information about error codes from GRUB, but nothing that says what has happened with GRUB when it comes to only the "GRUB" word.

I think ive searched on this before and i think i then found out that the words "G", "GR", "GRU", "GRUB" are all error codes, but maybe this was in earlier GRUB versions.

I cant find any information about these kind of error codes now. Can someone help me out here and please explain what these GRUB errors mean. Thanks for all help.

l li lil lilo I think is what you mean by that grub stutter....and they refer to different lilo error codes.

I am not aware of g gr etc

2) grub only heh?

you can only have 3 types of errors....harware is not compatible, bios errors, software errors.

since you can get to grub showing screen, we can eliminate bios.
but grub needs to jump to its booting files and I think something has NOT happened in your install to be sure its not some other error.

New grub not grub2...for stage 2 (image) errors reports a number and you have not.
stage 1 errors report a string and you have not.

therefore grub is in mbr but is not linked to /boot/grub booting files mainly the stage 2 file.

3) if you have a live cd, you can relink with

read my signature on hardware counting to know what numbers to put in X and Y, likely to be 0,0 if /boot is a subfolder to / and / is on first partition.

post your memory of how you partitioned drive if unclear.

I am not sure, but Debian install may have a rescue or recovery mode, if it does enter it and go into a console and try my commands.

Thanks for answering.

Hmm. Yes it might be lilo i was talking about there. I did a search on google and found these kind of errors related to LILO (http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bootdisk-HOWTO/a1483.html).

Well, the GRUB bootloader is the next-generation boot loader and i think its pretty nice. It is also widely used now on almost every linux distribution out there. Of course you other boot loaders like GAG and SYSLINUX which probably would be nice to look at, but trying these is not that easy if you dont know your way around bootloaders that much.

You mean that someone didnt get done under the installation that should have been done, like linking grub boot files correctly. Hmm, i think we used the same CD to install serveral other servers, like for example IBM and sun, and there were not problems when doing the installation then.

Hmm, yes, we might have used an old version of grub that came with the debian 3.1 installation or net install. But i think we also tried to install the debian 4.0 etch net install CD, but im not sure. This would have a newer version of grub and should then have displayed an error code like you say.

Would a live CD mount up the filesystem on the harddrive read/write or will it only be a temporary filesystem in memory? I think i sometimes have used live CD where there only is a temporary filesystem in memory and you have to mount the filesystem manually to get the filesystem on the harddrive in read/write mode.

Since we were having problems with the installation we in the end set up a partition table the installation automatically set up for us to see if that worked. We did try LVM with RAID first. This didnt work any better though. We did have a hardware RAID with RAID 0+1.

Yes, i think it has a recue mode, but again, with the liveCD.. i think it doesnt mount up the filesystem on disk, only a temporary in memory and then you have to mount the filesystem manually (saying this because i doesnt know how this is done and it think its different in many recue modes/liveCDs..i did mount it with "chroot /mnt/sysimage" last time though in debian.)

AFAIK you can not use raid striped with grub.

grub needs to find a complete booting file, the stage 2.

One way around this if you want raid striping, create a separate /boot partition that is not striped, and the others can be.

2) When you use the commands I have, with a live cd, you will get a success message.

3) I use a live cd Recovery Is Possible but I have also used Mepis, Kanotic Knoppix.
I am aware that if you use knoppix and RIP in gui mode, they automount the drives in read only mode....but I use it a runlevel 2 or console mode and I do not issue any manual mounting or umounting commands.

try umounting first and then repeat the grub commands above?

BTW what is your partition structure?

Hmm, thats interesting what you are saying about striping, but it does make sense when i think about how striping works. Important to note.

My partition structure were just set up automatically by the installation program since we had so much troubble installing the machine. I dont remember the exact partition scheme that we were going to use originally, but i think it was something like this:
own partition for /home
own partition for /var
own partition for /usr
set up with LVM.

We had RAID level 0+1 ..shouldnt that be striping _and_ mirroring... so this error shouldnt occur because of the hardware RAID setup because the data is cloned on all disks because of RAID level 1 and striped because of RAID 0.