open Suse Grub load error 21

jameskerr · 11-19-2010, 09:11 AM

I have a Dell Dimension 4400, 8 yrs old. It is set up to boot to either Open Suse 11 or Windows. I turned on the machine this morning, it booted very slowly. My screen says, "GRUB loading stage 1.5" then it says "Error 21." I can not go beyond this screen. My machine is stuck here. Any suggestions?

hughetorrance · 11-19-2010, 09:32 AM

Download the supergrubdisk and use it to restore GRUB... !

http://www.supergrubdisk.org/

If you have two drives then in the BIOS or with your function key F* select the other drive and see if that works.

yancek · 11-19-2010, 09:34 AM

Quote:

Selected disk does not exist
This error is returned if the device part of a device- or full file name refers to a disk or BIOS device that is not present or not recognized by the BIOS in the system

Above is what the error 21 for Grub is. Did you have a working dual boot of Opensuse and whatever windows version you were using? Is this a fresh install? Were any changes made recently? This generally happens when Grub can't find the partition with the Grub files. Post your /boot/grub/menu.lst file contents. Run the fdisk -l command as root and post your partition information here. (that is a lower case Letter L in the command and it must be run as root).

jameskerr · 11-19-2010, 10:28 AM

yancek - Yes, I had a working dual boot of Opensuse and Windows XP. I have 2 harddrives. Windows and Grub on one and Linux on the other. It is not a fresh install. Changes made to Linux were approx one week ago, with no problems. The machine may have rebooted in the middle of the night due to a Windows automatic upgrade. It seems to hang up and I get the error message when the light for the A drive comes on. As far as this is concerned "Post your /boot/grub/menu.lst file contents. Run the fdisk -l command as root and post your partition information here. (that is a lower case Letter L in the command and it must be run as root)." I'm not quite sure how to do this and so far, I can't get past the error screen.

yancek · 11-19-2010, 03:31 PM

There seem to be a lot of problems for people having automatic upgrades with windows, even when it is the only system?

You can use any Linux Live CD or if you still have your Opensuse CD you can use it. Open a terminal/konsole and log in as root by typing: su -; hit enter key. Usually don't need a password, depends on what you are using. The SuperGrubDisk should work as suggested above.