I would like to get Gentoo or Sabayon running on my desktop system.

Hard drives look like this

I have a Gentoo LiveCD, and Sabayon in iso format only... and an ubuntu livecd.

What my ideal system would look like is Gentoo on sdb and Sabayon on sdc. When i find out which i like better, i will get rid of the other and raid the two drives.

I went to install Gentoo onto sdb, everything went fine during a networkless install. When I rebooted the computer, it came up as

I cannot read it, everything is super fuzzy, grub displayed text as blocky white squares [] [][]

I figured it was just Gentoo, so installed Ubuntu onto sdb

I restarted, and got..

I don't know what is going on.

I no longer have any trace of a windows system on my computer anymore, besides the NTFS partition on a drive im not even using.

My next step is to disconnect all drives but sdb and see if it boots up.

I cannot touch sda because it has sabayon iso/ndiswrapper/wireless drivers on it.

Does anybody have an idea as to what could be causing grub to throw up these weird errors? I know both Ubuntu and Gentoo install flawlessly on my laptop (which im on at the moment :P )... the only difference is hardware.

Thank you!
-Sequalit

Your grub tries to to read hard drive hd1. Are you sure that you grub command line is correct? Before disconnecting sdb's and sda's you might want to check your BIOS setting, to make sure that the BIOS first tries to boot from the drive you think it has to.

those fat and ntfs tells me that you are more likely to have bios set already to boot sda....(hd0,0) in grub speak.

have a read of my signature...stick grub onto the mbr for sda....use the live cd to mount sdb and edit its /boot/grub/menu.lst to add an entry for chainloading ms as per signature.

rsashok:

That is the first thing i checked and my bios is in working order...

I just unplugged all devices but the one nix was installed onto and still received an Error 15...

I'm at a loss on what to do, I read a post about fixing some sort of grub file for error 15 to point to another drive... i will try that next and see what happens.

any suggestions or help is greatly appreciated!

this is a learning process for me lol ;p

aus9:

I had windows installed onto sdb before i formatted the drive, sda has always been used as a storage drive

Will look into your tutorial was my next step

aus9,

Thanks for the links, I always wanted to have relevant info like this within one keystroke, instead of my own badly organized notes on the subject matter. I bookmarked those for the reference.

aus9:

i believe you were right in the fact grub was pointing to the wrong hard drive, just for kicks i decided to move the slots the hard drives were connected too... ( i want my two 37gb to come up as sda and sdb and then the storage as sdc/sdd anyways ;p ) well upon swapping sdb with sda, it booted into ubuntu... of course now ubuntu is unable to mount the root file system cause its looking for it elsewear ;P

I am assuming proceeding from here, I should move the location of my hard drives back to normal and edit the grub file to point correctly, and then proceed with my sabayon install >.<

or I could reinstall ubuntu... Ill see what works

Whatever gets my raptor drives to show up as the first two drives i am happy... makes things more organized.

My guess is your two identical disks may be under Raid control and Grub doesn't know about it.

saikee:

no, i would love for them to be raid 0 though

unfortunately the drivers that came with the motherboard only work on windows... i cant get linux to see the drives at all when i stick them in the array control on the motherboard... this is another project once i find out which i like better, basic gentoo or sabayon

I reinstalled Gentoo... and this is the error that is displayed


pressing any key beings up a bunch of vertical white lines, obscuring what you can see is a box in the background with gentoo linux highlighted...


I was able to boot into Gentoo when I went directly to the hard drive Gentoo is installed on... obviously I have some errors with menu.lst configuration.

Right now it looks like this:

root (hd0, 0)
kernel blah blah blah...
boot

Now my devices are plugged in as so

60GB - SATA 1 - shows as sdc
37GB1 - SATA 3 - shows as sda
37GB2 - SATA 4 - shows as sdb.

Gentoo is installed on the hardrive connected to SATA 3 slot, so it will be sda...

how do i determine which drive is the correct one?

..edit...

I changed the menu.lst file while i was booted into the system, and now it wont boot at all...

the system will not boot like it did when i told the bios to boot from that disk...

was it just a fluk? before i hardbooted into the drive i had played around in grub command line with root(different hd destinations) may that have caused it?



edit-------------------

What happened was when i told my bios to boot into just that hard drive, the bios made that hard drive hd0.... exactly what was on the menu.lst file... so when i changed my menu.lst file, i can no longer boot into the system doing that again... therefore, i have to somehow edit my menu.lst file and reset it back to normal, or change it to what the device really is as far as my motherboard is concerned, which would be hd1 and i had changed it to hd2... we'll see how it works >.<

ALL MY PROBLEMS ARE SOLVED!



weee =) thanks for the help everyone!

Biggest problem, was the fact that my motherboard and linux assigns hard drives by different criteria... whereas to my motherboard, my linux was on hd1, but linux considered that sda.

After finally figureing out how to manually boot grub (that was a pita, considering all the text was garbled up and you couldnt read a thing) I got into the system, and editing my menu.lst to the correct drive mappings.

Next boot up was flawless!

All problems solved by fixing ONE number in the menu.lst file!

Now to continue my project, install a linux distro from the ISO located on a NTFS hard drive.


again thank you for all of your guyses help!

-sequalit