Grub Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... no (but it does) ???
 

Here is the situation - I have a Dell Dimension 4600 (Pentium 4) in which I have installed a "mobile rack" and have several drives which I can put into the rack (one at a time) depending on what OS I wish to run.

I created an install of Ubuntu 7.10 on an 80 GB SATA drive then backed it up with g4l. I built partitions on a 160 GB SATA drive to match the size of those on the 80 GB drive, copied the MBR using dd and restored the / and /home partitions to the 160 GB drive using g4l. Note: the 3rd partition is swap and the 4th partition /data is empty at this point - it takes up what ever space is left on the drives. Worked great.

Now I am trying to clone back from the 160 GB drive to an 80 GB drive. I have followed the same process. However, when I try to boot the machine goes to a GRUB prompt and stops.

After trying various things I decided to install Grub manually. I built the partitions with fdisk restored the data to sda1 and sda2 with g4l. This time I did NOT restore the mbr. Then I booted from a Ubuntu 7.10 live CD. Here is the layout of the 80 GB drive:
I invoked grub and proceeded as follows:

I ran fsck on the partitions which I had restored with g4l and they showed clean. I then mounted partitions on the drive and poked about. I was able to navigate around the / and /home partitions (sda1 and sda2) with no problem. The stage1 file appeared to be where it was supposed to be:

I am no doubt missing something simple here. My next step is to do a clean install of Ubuntu on the 80 GB drive just to make sure it is not a mechanical malfunction. I sort of doubt that as I have recently run XP and Fedora 9 on this drive.

Thank for any advice.

Ken

p.s. Do I need to mount sda1 before running the grub "setup" command? Guess I will try that as well.

hd0 vs hd?
 

Sometimes BIOS and therefore Grub have a different idea about the drive order than you do. You mentioned a multirack system, I suspect that placing the drives in different locations may be underlying the problem, particularly if more than one drive is in at the time.

Try typing, at the grub prompt:

root ([TAB]

to see what drives are available. You can then use

find (hd0,0)/grub/stage1

or variations thereof to find out where grub thinks the files are.

No if you have the grub shell your commands were good and if you are doing this from your ubuntu install disk. My only question is are you sure your root partition is number 1 and if it is your commands should be

root (hd0,0)

setup (hd0)

Thanks for the prompt reply Larry. Tried mounting and that did not help - as you indicated. I believe you have hit the nail on the head. If partition numbering is zero based my root would be 0. I was following instructions in an article where the writer had about half a dozen different OS installed on the same disk. In reading it again I think he was installing on his second partition for some reason. I simply followed his example.

I just finished installing a fresh Ubuntu 7.10 image on the existing partitions of the 80 GB drive. Booted fine. I then used g4l to replace the / and /home partitions and again it boots. I will go back and try "boot (hd0,0)" and make sure that works. Then I have to remember why I was making this copy of my "production" install(?) I think it was to upgrade to 8.04 and see what gets broken. Thanks again!

Regards,

Ken

It helps to use the correct partition. boot (hd0,0) did the trick. Thanks again.

You are welcome.