Trouble booting Red Hat 7.2 from hdb
 

I have a Windows 98 system that I've put a second HD in. I installed Red Hat 7.2 on the second HD (barely -- it's only a 2 GB drive). During the install, I told it to put GRUB on hdb. Then I went into the BIOS (the motherboard is a GA-586HX) and told it to boot from D:

I got the dreaded LI <hang>.

Things I've tried so far:

1) Changed the disk access method in the CMOS so that it tries "Normal" mode (i.e. CHS). That was worse; instead of just an LI, I got a constant scrolling repeat of LI up the left side of the screen.

2) Booting with the CD as a rescue disk then reinstalling grub (by running grub and using "setup"). The install said it was successful (I put it on hd1,0 in grub-speak), but I still just got the LI hang.

3) Booting from grub itself. When I type "kernel /vmlinuz" it tells me it can't find the file. Doing "find /vmlinuz", either in grub or just from the command line as root tells me "file not found".

4) Making a bootdisk. Booted up with the rescue disk, chroot, "mkbootdisk--device /fd0 2.4.7-10" (I might be misremembering the kernel number).
Also got a "file not found" type of error.

I have a suspicion that the 2 GB HD I'm using was used as an hda for a linux machine before -- no idea which distro or anything. Could LILO still be haunting the MBR? I tried "lilo -u /dev/hdb" and it just said "can't find /etc/lilo.conf" or words to that effect.

What I would like to be able to do:

1)(in an ideal world) set the CMOS to boot from D, and have GRUB come up (defaulting to Win98 but allowing a choice of Linux). I do _not_ want to mess with the MBR on hda or anything else on hda.

2)(if I have to) make a boot floppy that can boot just Linux (or that can dual boot if that's easier).

I am a relative Linux newbie -- this is my first install, although I've
had a shell account on a friend's machine for years and I use Unix
everyday, but only as a user. I don't know how to mount things, but I can read FAQs and man pages.

Here's the specs for the machine:
P 133 with 96 MB RAM, a 17 GB Fujitsu drive as hda and a 2 GB samsung drive as HDB. The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-586HX 2.01. The video card is old and crappy, but I'm guessing that doesn't matter for booting (it ran the graphical install okay). The CD is some new 52x that I also don't seem to be having any problems with.

Thanks in advance for any help anyone can offer.

Well, I know you said you don't want to do it, but there really shouldn't be any harm in experimenting with the MBR of hda - just running "fdisk /mbr" from a dos prompt has always cleared up any problems I've had in the past.

Didn't the RedHat installer create a boot disk for you? Is that disk not working?

As far as grub goes, if grub-install is claiming to work, then I don't know - is your /boot/grub/grub.conf correct?

It's strange that LILO isn't overwritten... There's a method. Create a Windows boot disk, turn off the machine, disconnedct the Windows drive (important!), boot from the floppy and run
fdisk /mbr
Then boot from the Linux cd and install grub again (with the Windows disk connected).

There's is no need to change BIOS. Changing BIOS has very
significant effects.
IN your first attempt i.e when bios had only one drive, the first
hard drive is /dev/hda1, and the second hd is /dev/hdb. If you
change bios to boot using second disk, then the second disk
becomes /dev/hda and not /dev/hdb. So, try changing the first
disk back to be bootable.

I didn't know I needed a formatted disk at that time and didn't have an operating Linux system to format one with. So, yes, it asked to, but no, it didn't do it 'cuz I didn't have a floppy.

I don't have a /boot/grub/grub.conf (at least not when I'm running a rescue disk). I have a link to it in the /etc directory, but I can't edit it (shows up as "new file" when I run vi).

I did get the machine to start up grub (I tried making a boot floppy), but then it tells me it can't find the kernel. I'm trying to see if I can point it somewhere else, maybe (it's looking on hd0,1 -- my root is hd1,3).

I don't have a /boot/grub/grub.conf (at least not when I'm running a rescue disk). I have a link to it in the /etc directory, but I can't edit it (shows up as "new file" when I run vi).
In /etc/ what you've got is probably a broken symlink, because your /boot partition isn't mounted.

I would suggest you boot from the rescue disk, mount the boot partition at /boot, make necessary alterations to /etc/grub.conf (which probably really points to /boot/grub/grub.conf) ie setting (hd1,3), and then run grub-install /dev/fd0 to remake your grub disk.

O.K., I'm totally confused about your problem. If you installed Grub, you won't get and "LI" of any kind.

If you actually did install Grub, the configuration and menu functions are in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file (in some install situations it ends up in /boot/boot/grub/menu.lst). There are some cases/distros where a grub.conf file is created, but it usually either points to the menu.lst file, or is a temporary file only used during the set up operation. That would explain why lilo can't find the lilo.conf file.

It is really much better if boot instructions are written to the MBR of the primary hard drive ("hda"), since that's the shortest path for the BIOS and its bootstrap loader to follow as it looks for an OS. The Grub menu.lst file can be on your secondary hard drive, that won't affect how the boot operation progresses -- in fact the code that Grub will write to the primary MBR will tell where to find the menu.lst and the rest of the boot code for any OS that you may want Grub to manage.

Try to find the menu.lst file, and then post the entire contents here. It'll be much easier to sort out :D !!

Okay, re what filename is what, I just poked around my redhat system and the structure is this:

/etc/grub.conf is a symlink to /boot/grub/grub.conf

/boot/grub/grub.conf and /boot/grub/menu.lst are hardlinked.

(/boot is just the mountpoint for an ext3 boot partition on a default redhat setup)

It really makes no difference whatsoever which of these files we play with.

jglen490: we believe that the lilo is just a vestige of a previous linux installation: this drive is second hand.

Okay, further updates:
The HD (when I set it to boot from hdb) was filling up the screen with GRUB.

I tried my boot disk (which, when I look at it by mounting it, just shows two old Word .doc files) and it gave me the GRUB menu. Then I noticed that at the bottom it says you can edit the commands! Woo-hoo! So I went into the shell and tried a few things -- I found the kernel, and actually managed (by just changing some of the entries in the menu, like pointing it to the right /root partition and prepending /boot/ to the path for vmlinuz-2.4.7-10 ) to get it to start the boot sequence!

But THEN I get an error 22 mounting ext3 (just after unable to read superblock). It goes on to kernel panic.

Boot from your installation cd and run fsck on the root partition. It may help (but maybe you've just entered wrong root= ?).

Okay, I gave up. I went back to the Windows way.

That is, I had a problem, so I reinstalled. :-) This time I figured, hey, there's nothing on the Win98 drive that I can't fix, so I let Red Hat put grub on hda.

It works great! Well, a P133 with 98 MB is probably a little slow for KDE, but other than that, I'm up and running!

Thanks a lot for all your help, everybody.