FC4: "GRUB Loading Stage2... read error" at startup
 

My FC4 laptop is refusing to boot. It hangs early in the startup process, shortly after the BIOS is initialized, with the following error:

If I try booting the system from FC4 rescue disk using default settings, I get another error:

I have been able to boot Knoppix (v4.0) and can mount and browse the laptop partitions. However, I am unable to chroot to the root directory:

returns "Bus error".

I have run fsck on the partitions and corrected some errors, but still the GRUB error. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Reinstall grub with repair option on cds.

Could do a fdisk/mbr option which will delete grub.

Could also check your grub config. Can you boot different kernels??

If you can boot different kernels then check your grub config and see if your lastest kernel is commented out.

That could be possible.

If all else fails then reinstall sounds like one of your last options.

You could alsl try lillo as a boot manager.

Thanks for the suggestions. As far as I can tell, booting the Fedora rescue CD basically just allows you to mount your root partition under /mnt/sysimage from where one can run grub-install. However, when I try to chroot to it, I keep getting the "bus error" message.

Yesterday, I tried reinstalling OS from the FC4 DVD. I deleted and recreated the boot partition with Druid, but when Anaconda subsequently went to format it, it crashed with a few lines of unhelpful Python errors.

At this point, I am unable to determine whether the drive is (partly) failing or some kind of bizarrre configuration error has cropped up. In the meantime, I am able to boot Knoppix on the laptop and mount and view the partitions, so it is "kinda" working; it just that I can't seem to be able to boot from the drive.