Problem after installation of Red Hat EL4

liknocks · 08-30-2005, 10:30 AM

I just installed Red Hat EL4 on an ASUS P2B-F mobo with 2 Hitachi 400GB hard drives on the same IDE channel. On the first re-boot after the installation, when the BIOS tries to find a boot sector, the word GRUB appears on the screen and then everything stops. Only a ctrl-alt-del works and the same thing happens over again. I've re-formatted and re-installed several times with the same results. I've even downloaded Hitachi's HD util which erases the HD boot sector, re-installed and got the same result.
Any ideas?
Thanks in advance.

logicalfuzz · 08-30-2005, 12:32 PM

Maybe your 1st stage of grub bootloader is not installed properly. if you still have RHEL4 installed and get the 'grub>' prompt, then bot rescue mode from1st cd and enter chroot environment by typing

Code:

chroot /mnt/sysimage

Now type

Code:

grub-install /dev/hdx

where 'x' can be the drive you want to install the 1st stage (normally for single boot people choose the Master HD and for multiboot they prefer slave HD,). you can find that out by using

Code:

 fdisk -l 
(AFAIK hda/hdc are master & hdb/hdd are slave)

if everything goes fine you should get a graphical grub boot screen when you bootup next time

WhatsHisName · 08-30-2005, 12:57 PM

What you are experiencing should be trivial to fix, but you need to understand grub a little better to do it.

Have a look at the grub manual: http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html

Pay close attention to chapter 3 “Installation”, which contains subsections 3.3 “Installing GRUB using grub-install” and 3.2 “Installing GRUB natively”. My preference is the native installation, because you get so much more diagnostic information if things are not working out.

If something doesn’t make sense or you run into a problem, then ask for help. It is really worth your time to learn about grub, because it will haunt you again-and-again until you understand it.

Be aware that grub naming of drives and partitions is a little odd, in that everything starts at zero instead of one. For example, hda1 is usually (hd0,0).

Also, look at subsection 3.1 “Creating a GRUB boot floppy”, which can also be used to create a “Grub Boot Flash Drive”. If you had a grub boot floppy, it would take you maybe 2 minutes to fix your problem.