Cant get this sucker to boot!
 

Hello,

I'm running into an odd problem that either I'm simply not experienced enough to fix on my own or cannot be fixed at all. Perhaps one of you fine people could give me some ideas as to what to do next.

It all started after I loaded VMware after installing knoppix (effectively installing a Debian woody box). Everything seemed to work fine but one day it all just froze up on me and on a reboot I got an error like "L 99 99 99 99 ..." halfway across the screen. I was able to fix this by doing a fdisk /mbr w/ a dos disk. Well it froze up again and fdisk /mbr didn't bring the system up again.

I'm trying to use a boot partition I created at hda1:

hda1 = boot (ext2)
hda2 = swap
hda3 = root (ext2)

I've already done a western digital drive scan to see if there are any issues with the drive, the boot utility reported no issues whatsoever.

After trying unsuccessfully to reinstall lilo I finally just installed grub. Now grub does come up at boot. I have grub installed at the MBR and the box boots into the grub prompt just fine. But when I do this:

it detects my hard drive and CD-ROMs but then it seems to continue to try to detect and load up other hd devices in order. It will improperly detect hda4, 5, then 6 and freeze up saying that it couldn't boot the kernel.

I can access/edit all the information on the drive with a knoppix CD though.

any thoughts?

Don't shoot me if I'm wrong
 

I don't hink you can put boot on a seprate partition. I'm not sure on that. I may be wrong. You may want to read up on that.
You may can boot from the #1 CD and hit F1 then type in rescue. Follow instructions from there. Never did it but that's what I have read.

Hope it helps.

:D :D :D

You can install /boot on a sepreate partition. In fact, it is best to do so.

This is how mine looks in /etc/grub.conf
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.7-10 ro root=/dev/hda3
initrd /initrd-2.4.7-10.img

If you can get into the system with a rescue disk. Try editing the file. Look in boot to see what the name of your kernel is and your initrd file and make corrections in the above as necessary.

I warned you
 

I said I may be wrong. I guess I was. :tisk: :tisk:

:D :D :D

We're all wrong some time :) Linux is a lifetime learning experience :D

This is what I had done:

I installed grub to the hda1 mbr but didn't really complete the setup. Once this was created I booted into the grub prompt and pointed initrd to /dev/hda3/etc/init, the kernel to vmlinuz on the boot partition and root as my root partition (hda3). That got me into the system after typing in boot. I had to make it permanent by creating a menu.lst file with the update-grub utility. Then I went into the grub prompt again and instead of typing in boot at the end of the setup I did the setup (hda) command. That finally fixed it. :)