Booting from a CD using Grub?

kaider · 08-01-2004, 01:36 PM

Is it possible?

I am (or was) running Red Hat 9.0 on an x86 laptop. Everything has been fine for months when suddenly my boot sequence hangs at:

Starting pcmcia: Yenta IRQ list 0000, PCI irq10
Socket status: 30000010

Anyway, if anyone can figure out how to get past this point, I won't need to boot from GRUB. But any help would be greatly appreciated.

Sudden thought: was trying to load laptop with a wireless card in the pci slot in the vicinity of a wireless network when this first happened. Battery was extremely low, and started beeping during the startup sequence. Any possibility that the low battery startup attempt is now causing the startup processes to search for a wireless network that is no longer there, and thus hang? Just a thought.

Thanks in advance for any help.

marghorp · 08-01-2004, 02:59 PM

use kudzu, to determine, that the card is not there anymore. Kudzu is a service, that looks for new hardware and gets rid of the hardware that is no longer there.

kaider · 08-01-2004, 03:43 PM

Good suggestion, but how? Kudzu sounds like a program to use from the terminal command line in Linux. I can't seem access it from GRUB.

And is there a hotkey to spam to get into Linux BIOS on startup? This is a pretty dumb question, I guess, but I am just covering my bases.

marghorp · 08-02-2004, 10:54 AM

not from grub, from the OS. Can you even get past GRUB? anyhow?

OK, if you can't just start from grub. Get to the command line. Press c at the graphical screen, or p to enter your grub password.

Once in the grub command line, use these commands:

find /boot/grub/grub.conf

or

find /grub/grub.conf

Whichever finds the file is the right one.

It will return a result of (hd0,0) or something like it

then use the root command:

root (hd0,0)

where hd0,0 is the result you got from the find command

type cat /grub/grub.conf or cat /boot/grub/grub.conf ( I am not sure whether it is cat or less, so experiment)

It will produce the content of the grub.conf file.

There will be some lines like

title Fedora
kernel /vmlinuz....... ...... .....
initrd /initrd.......img

At the kernel line there is probably a pcmcia switch somewhere.

You should make it look like this:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.5 ro root=LABEL=/

So this is it. Retype the lines one by one (do not type the title one, just the kernel and initrd lines and in the kernel line loose the pcmcia switch, you figure it out, which it is)

and after you did:

kernel /vmlinuz
initrd /init...

type boot, to boot the computer, you should get to the Linux OS now.

good luck!

Peace!