I installed a cd writer and a new HD on this older server. It died after that and had to replace the cpu. Now, after fighting with it, I have gotten it to start up. But still no linux. Here's what I got...

I have 2 HDs installed. One is a scsi (sda1) which has all the boot info. The other is a 160 gig with mostly all my info which is split in hdb1-hdb4. And a cd writer. This is all according to Knoppix.

When I start the computer, all I get is GRUB on the screen. If I disconnect the 160 gig drive, the computer starts up fine. I have checked and double checked and sda1 has the boot and grub folder. The other drive just has files on it.

I tried this that I found on another page...
chroot /mnt/sysimage/
grub-install /dev/sda
exit
exit

That did nothing. everything seems ok to me. fdisk -l /dev/sda or hdb shows all the partitions. /boot/grub/device.map shows (hd0) /dev/sda.

I'm out of ideas. Any ideas?

what does /boot/grub.conf say? Perhaps there is a problem there.

Not excatly sure how this fixed it, but it did. here's what i did...

I read to do this command...

grub-install --recheck /dev/sda

it gave me hd0 /dev/hdb and hd1 /dev/sda, which is wrong. I went back and changed it to hd0 /dev/sda which is what i had to begin with. then ran the grub-install /dev/sda and restarted. again, i don't know why that worked since i know for a fact that i had hd0 /dev/sda in there before, but it worked. crazy.



And a while later, the main drive died and that's the end of my info. And to think this all started when I tried to add a cd writer to back stuff up. Awesome.