GRUB Loading stage2 Error, hard-disk broken ???

jdevitt · 03-12-2005, 06:55 AM

I´ll try to be as concise as possible, since the last days had
been mostly occupied by my attempts to resolve this problem.

I had at work a desktop which had a windowsXP system installed on it
when I started at this company. I managed to installed Fedora Core 2
on dual booting and everything was working without problems for weeks,
till my Fedora crashed two days ago when starting Eclipse.

I had to switch off the computer and booted it again. But I bump into a:

GRUB Loading stage2

Error 18: Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS

After searching for a long while on internet and trying all kind of possible
solutions which did not work for different reasons, I booted my system with a
KNOPPIX CD and got to mount two Hard-drive partitions.

The windows partition could be browsed flautless.

But the partition for my /home directory showed two directories /lost+found and /jdevitt (my user directory) but my /jdevitt directory is not a directory but a file with size 0.

I am at my wit´s end. What kind of problem do I have?
Can I recover my data on this partition? Is it my hard-disk broken?
Please help, I thank you all in advance for any advice.

jane

mrGenixus · 03-31-2005, 01:02 PM

fedora killed yor filesystem: run a stable distor like debian unstable in the future. get a windows cd and run fixboot in the recovery console to remove grub and windows will work again. Your files in your home directory are gone, you might find some of them in lost+found. Seriously though FC is very buggy, I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. Just look at the lists of wierd fedora problems on this forum.

ttgamage · 09-07-2005, 01:54 AM

hi

i just installed FC4 on my intel chipset motherboard. after installation the screen displays GRUB loading stage2 and nothing happens there after. the computer just waits... initially the installation was also problem since it gave cannot find ramdisk error but i managed to overrun it. can some one help me to get over this mess cause i'm in desperate need of installing fedora core 4 in my system pls.

thanks

mrGenixus · 09-07-2005, 12:48 PM

honestly what you have is a new-thread type of issue.:

- If I were you, I'd go to the gentoo website and use the gentoo handbook so figure out how to properly configure grub. If you "overran" the "unable to find initrd " error message, you probably broke fedora worse than it was already broken. If all else fails, you could reinstall fedora

ttgamage · 09-08-2005, 08:21 AM

thank u very much for your quick reply. my problem just got worse. i re installed grub by logging into grub> using linux rescue and using root(hd0,8) followed by setup(hd0,8) where my / is in hda9. but it didn't work either. then i re installed fedora this time by installing the bootloader to the MRB. after that now i can't login to windows too. the worst thing is i can't use the windows setup cd to use fixmbr since the machine just hangs after dispalying windows will now configure your hardware.... or something similar to that i tried every thing i possibly can changing jumpers, boot sequences even master slave arrangements and no result. finally i pluged my hard disk in one of my friends machine and it runs the windows blue screen setup and complains it can't find hard disk.

what i did was i used his machine and my hard drive as slave, backed up every thing i need and completly deleted the partitions. now the windows setup runs(even in my machine) with out earlier complains.

this is my current situation. i need to re-partiton my hard drive and start everything from scratch. definitely i need fedora with windows in my machine for my project work and i will try the same thing again. hopefully i doubt i will end up in the same mess again.

please provide me with further assistance on what shall i do..

most importantly i need to install grub to the first sector of the boot partition and not to the MBR.

please help

mrGenixus · 09-15-2005, 08:54 AM

just a thought: If you install grub to the first boot partiition how will you boot?

here's what you need to do: Reinstall WIndows first, giving it adeqate space on the begginning of the drive. Then, Install Fedora to the MBR. Then make sure there's a windows boot line in your grub configuration. Anaconda (the installer) can usually do that for you).
If Fedora still does not boot, use a gentoo livecd to very which partition is your boot partition.
manually boot using the grub command line:

root (hd0,8)
kernel vmlinuz-2.6.11-i38...
initrd initrd...
boot

and so on, once you've got that, try manually editing your grub.conf, or menu.1st file to make these steps permanent