I added a DVD/CD-RW to the system. Afterwards when booting, there is a 30 sec delay during which there is a blank screen, except for the upper left hand corner displaying, “loading Grub stage 2.” After the delay, the grub splash screen comes up and everything works OK. Suse 9.1. I would like to get rid of the delay.

When I added a DVD/CD drive my linux drive changed from hdc to hdd. (Primary master: windows hd; slave: CD reader; Secondary master: DVD/CD-RW, slave: linux hd). The cables aren’t long enough to swap the master/slave so that the linux drive remains the secondary master, and the BIOS only uses the cable selection, so I seem to be stuck with the CD/drive master/slave arrangement.

To make the installation work I had to change ‘fstab’ and the grub ‘menu.lst’ to reflect the change. I also reinstalled the boot from YAST. The installation works just fine, but it would be nice not to have the 30 sec additional boot time.

My guess is that the initial boot code is trying the DVD/CD as if it were a hd, then timing out, and going on to the correct drive. Someplace there should be a way to by-pass that. ‘device.map’ is correct, so that doesn’t appear to be the problem.

Don

in the /boot/grub directory is a file called

menu.lst

the delay time should be there..........

Or when you boot and you have a choice of kernels or op systems, I think you can press e or something and it comes up there.

You could try removing the CDROM entry from your device map entirely. I don't know if that would have the desired effect, but it's worth a try. Grub can't very well probe a device it doesn't know exists...

Unfortunately, I don't know all the ins-and-outs of Grub configuration to know if there is a bypass option or not. So I'm not much use there... sorry.

I think that could be motherboard problem.
I have ASUS A7V8X-MX motherboard, and it works fine when I boot form IDE-0.
But when I change to IDE-1 it takes a very long time to boot.
(My both HDs are bootable.)

320mb,

The delay occurs before the ‘menu.lst’ time delay. Changing the delay in ‘menu.lst’ only changes the duration it wait for the op to make a selection.

Dark_Helmet,

If you are referring to ‘device.map’ the cd drives don’t appear in it. It shows:
(hd0) /dev/hda
(hd1) /dev/hdd
(fd0) /dev/fd0

Not now, John!,

The motherboard being the cause seems unlikely, since before I added the DVD-CDW the linux hd was on the secondary IDE and there was no delay. It was master, however. Nevertheless the mother board could be invovled. The board is an Intel 865GLCL with a P4. It is a recent model and has “everything” integrated on the board.

Oh,well, maybe it's something I'll just have to live with.

Don

The BIOS determines which devices, and their order, will be checked for a bootable OS. Check your BIOS for a timeout/timedelay of some kind.

No, I think that the cable select is a bit confused, and is taking that time to determine what has changed and where what it's looking for really is now.

Did you jumper the DVD/CD-RW unit for Cable Select when you installed it?

bigrigdriver,

The time delay is after the initial boot with the bios, and the screen is showing “Loading grub stage 2”. This means that stage 1 (in the mbr on hda) has loaded.

motub,

I tried all combinations of jumper settings. The bios only has cable select option. Bios only recognizes the drives when the jumpers are in master/slave settings that match the cable, or of course, cable select positions.

Don

Yes, I understand, but what I'm thinking is that Loading grub stage 2 happens when the first stage is looking for the location of stage 2 as already set in the MBR. Stage 2 is a tarball in your /boot/grub folder. If the discovery is not happening fast, it suggests that your drives aren't where they're expected to be in some fashion, and Grub is having to look for them (for 30 seconds, which I would imagine is being spent in asking "are you hdd?" "are you?"), which is why I wanted to look at this issue of cable detection.

But wait... why is the floppy drive appearing in your device.map? I rather think that the 30 second delay might well be probing the floppy, as that takes a really long time.

If you don't intend to boot from a floppy (meaning that if you don't have a grub stage 2 install on a floppy disk, what good does it do to be looking there), maybe you could remove that line (device.map can be edited in a text editor), and see if that helps.

You can always put it back, since you have printed the original config here for posterity in case you forget .

motub,

Removing fd0 in the device.map made no difference.

re-install GRUB...
when you install grub it porbles for hardware.... not that your hardware has changed it may be confused...

[code]grub-install --root-directory=/ /dev/hda[/code[

replace /dev/hda with the bootable hard drive device.

Thanks for the post.

I have tried reinstalling grub, and even did a clean re-format disk install, but the problem remains.

i have some prob in dual boot XP with FC4. i want to install the boot loader to the first sector of the boot partition(not to mbr) and my ext3 partition is hda9 with swap deing hda10. the windows partition is hda1
after installation i used the linux rescue feature and got the .bin file using dd if=/dev/hda9 bs=512 count=1 of=/dev/fd0/linux.bin and did the nesessary modifications in windows boot.ini too. but now when i try to login to fedora the screen displays GRUB loading stage2.......and nothing happens can some one please help me since i'm desperate to use fedora for some software development.

also anyone having good links to serial port programming in java? pls