Boot Problems
 

Ok I'm having a rather annoying problem with my boot sequence. My laptop (HP Pavilion zv6000) is setup with a dual boot with Windows XP Pro and openSUSE v. 10; and booting with grub 1.5. The boot process works perfectly most of the time, however every 3rd or 4th boot fails. Here's what happens: I turn on the power, the HP splash screen loads, then the message "Loading Grub 1.5..." appears, and then the screen goes blank, reboots, and then the process repeats. I can fix it by inserting openSUSE disk 1, restoring the MBR, and re-installing the boot loader, but 3 or 4 boots latter...bam! Same problem. Does anyone know what the hell is going on?

GRUB 1.5 stage file is located right after MBR, this area of hard disk is normally unused. But some Windows programs might use this area for their copyright protection schemes and overwrite your stage 1.5 :(

Emerson,

I think the possibility of Windows doing the damage is unlikely. I say this because Windows does not support Linux and so can't possibly temper a Linux partition with foreign Type ID and an unknown file system.

Jack of Spades,

The Grub stage1.5 should be stored in the boot sector of the Linux partition (start from the first sector of the partition). Grub's intelligence is in the stage2 which is too big to be accommodated in the boot sector and hence stage1.5 is used to bridge the gap.

Grub used in Suse 10 should be version 0.96.

I can't offer an explanation to the problem but I did run into it from time to time. To overcome it I just do a grub-install or invoking the Grub shell to issue the root + setup command to restore the boot loader again. Full instructions are documented as Task B5 and B4 respectively in the last link of my signature.

Well, my posting was based on this. Jack, I'd recommend to copy let's say first 4 sectors from your HDD with dd when GRUB works and when it doesn't and compare them.