Hi all -

I was dabbling around with bootsplashs and on a reboot - grub came up, I picked 'linux' (defualt kernel), it looked like it stated to load, the screen went black and there it sat doing nothing (no HD activity at all).

I booted to the cd, and went into 'recovery' mode. I get a memory error (message really, not much of an 'error' ) when putting pack on grub.

I went into recovery mode again and tried to swith to lilo, but that gives me an error about hd (0,0) when its booting and throws up a kernel panic within a few seconds.

So, I grabbed an extra hard drive and installed libranet, just so I could get on the board here and PLEAD for help. I spent 2-3 weeks fine tuning my suse and I really don't want to start over.

I could problably fix it If I could boot to a console, edit the files I changed and run mk_initrd , but I can't run mk_initrd while booting to a CD.

please help - thanks. - tw

He he... been in this position sooo many times, myself.... Hacking around...

You messed up menu.lst and have to edit it now?

You can download any live cd distro, such as knoppix or even the rescue cd, if I recall, it's got a text editor inside. Also, any live suse will do, but they are bigger isos.

Hope you can benefit from my section of menu.lst (just make sure you are configuring to your specific system):

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title SuSE 9.1
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2 vga=0x317 desktop resume=/dev/hdb1 showopts
initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd

UPDATE:

I tried to go through like I did last night and install grub and lilo via system recovery off of the install CD. I was an attempt to get exact error messages to post here.

Well, I ran the utility that automatically checks the whole system, and it prompted me to fix grub - so naturally I said yes. It works. Back in Suse and all is well.

HOWEVER, if someone would like to explain to me why the automatic fix worked and the selective (where I only had the system look at the boot manager) did not, I would be much appreciative.

As I have read somwhere on this forum, learning suse is learning suse, not just linux. Suse definatly does have its own ways of doing things. And they confuse the hell out of me at times.

thanks anyway folks - I am guessing I got luck this time.

best regards - tw

bruno buys,

thanks for the post. Now that I am back up and running - and tyring to figure out where I went wrong, I looked at the menu.lst in /boot/grub/. I think I recall editing that file for some reason

(becuase I recognized what you typed)

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title SuSE 9.1
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2 vga=0x317 desktop resume=/dev/hdb1 showopts
initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd

----------------------------

But both my menu.lst and my menu.lst.old (i made a copy) are both blank.

Although /boot/grub/device.map it has:

(hd0) /dev/hda
(fd0) /dev/fd0

(and thats it)

Maybe I should leave my Suse alone. Thats why I have slack on my laptop


thanks again - tw

*******
HOWEVER, if someone would like to explain to me why the automatic fix worked and the selective (where I only had the system look at the boot manager) did not, I would be much appreciative.
*******

<This is a big guess> My instinct says it has to do with partition tables or initrd, in some way. But it's hard to know when you didn't keep track of every change made to the system.
To me, the blank files are even more weird.

Well, yes, suse's got its own tweaks. Its a matter of taste, I guess.

your thought on initrd sounds about right to me. But if my file is empty (menu.lst), and the system boots, well - thats good enough for me I guess,

Maybe someday I'll run initrd , but I have leaned my lesson once again - if its not broke, don't fix it. I like my susse 'casue it sets up easy and I can get work done.

I'm gonna go install slack 10 on my laptop and try boot splashs with that - for now - suse is in place and all is well.


thanks agian bruno buys.

-tw

Hello,

For the Grub boot loader, the configuration file, which is written into your Master Boot Record (MBR) by the grub-install, might have been corrupt so that the pre-loader at the MBR could not find the operating system loader at the location /boot. Or, the location of /boot on the Kernel line is set wrong and the system cannot find the vmlinuz..image even if the pre-loader loads.

In the grub.conf, /boot for the disk and the partition are specified In the /boot/grub/grub.conf: for example, (hd0,4) refers to /hda5. ,(hd1,2) refers to /hdb3 in your /etc/fstab specification for the first column. (here, assuming that you have two hard drives. root (hd0,1) means that the bootable kernel which is in /boot is located in the first disk at the 2nd partition. These address information are written at the MBR of the hafd disk hda when the grub is for the first initialized or when you execute "grub-install /dev/hda" (installing on the first disk = hd0). After the execution is transferred to /boot partition. and the system kernel starts to load vmlinuz bootable kernel using the location root=/dev/XXXX on the kernel line. Then, the linux starts.

Often you find that root=LABEL=/ on the kernel line. This means that the linux searches for the partition with the LABEL "/" (For example, "using the commercial program Partition Magic 8.0 for windows" can specify Linux ext2, ext3 file label easily.--assuming that multi-boot system with windows is on your computer).

Does this explanatioin help? (A good reference written about this is in the chapter "Using Grub, or Lilo boot loaders, Red Hat Linux 9 Bible").

great explination harutakeda - thanks. I folowed your explination by viewing each file. I am guessing I have a lot to learn about grub.

and i correct myself from earlier. I have to be root to view /boot/grub/menu.lst - apprently I can't even SU to view it, I have to log in as root.

Anyway, thanks to bruno buys for the posts and to harutakeda for the explination.