i've recompiled the kernel and i've tried dropping suse's grub/menu.lst straight into LFS's menu.lst. Doesn't seem to work. When I try using the grub shell, I am unable to do anything at all, as no matter what option I choose for root, i get the error 21: no such disk error. the kernel now has support for reiser and xfs, but no luck. One thing that might be interesting is that the LFS partition is an extended partition, would that make any difference?

oh dear.
so if you go into grub shell, from Host and try to set root
you get 21 whatever?

does find /boot/grub/menu.lst work?

yes that'll work on suse no problem, and i can configure there ok. but not with LFS grub shell where i continuosly get the error 21

well, you obviously ain't stoopid.

I would suggest, copy LFS to another partition.
delete hda7, recreate it. make it reiserfs. copy LFS back onto it
and try agin.

or maybe create it as ext2 and convert to ext3 later?

that's all I can think of.

thanks billy, i was thinkin much the same, i think i'll take off FC3 (primary partition) and put LFS on it there on a reiser FS, maybe even build the whole thing again??

I wouldn't have thought a rebuild would be strictly neccessary.
(I am lazy)

But i'd be interested to hear the outcome though.

Keep me posted!

will do thanks for all your help too by the way

I don't know if it helps or gives you any comfort, but I get exactly the same error when I go through the LFS 6.0 instructions, so I think there is a problem in the book, either when using some host distros or perhaps it is with certain types of BIOS. I am using FC3 as the host.

The error interpretation in the grub manual suggests that the BIOS doesn't recognise hd0.

I had to use a rescue disk to set up grub. Linux rescue loaded LFS on hda4 and then I set up grub successfully from there. Very odd that it worked in this environment but not when chrooted to LFS from the host.

Did you get any further with your investigations? Did you post on the lfs mailing list?

Yes. But I had to go and make the whole thing all over again. The first time, I reckon I'd missed something further back, maybe, but now all is well. On my first attempt, the grub shell in chroot was doing nothing at all, and gave me an error 21 for any configuration I tried. I posted to the LFS mailing list - excellent source I might add. I've finished LFS-6.0 now, and I at the X stage in BLFS. I'm having serious trouble here though, with detecting my mouse. Thanks for the reply too

I had the same problem when I went through LFS. In my case, I'm pretty sure it's because at that point /dev hadn't been populated.
My solution: put that entry for the LFS system into the host system's menu.lst. Reboot directly into LFS. /dev is now populated and you can configure grub properly.