[SOLVED] GrubStuck

Don Pedro · 09-05-2022, 11:48 AM

Hi out there

This is my very first post, so apologies if I don't do things in the approved way.

I've painstakingly made my way through the LFS procedure (11.1) and was excited to find myself at a GRUB screen on the first attempted boot. I think I kinda expected the old ThinkPad (X200) to vanish into hyperspace. But it did no such thing; it went nowhere. Just said "error: disk `hd0,2' not found." I was invited to "Press any key" but got no further.

Thinking I might find something to edit, I found this rather sparse two-liner

setparams 'GNU/Linux, Linux 5.16.9-lfs-11.1'
linux /boot/vmlinuz-5.16.9-lfs-11.1 root=/dev/sda2 ro

Now: /dev/sda2 is my swap area (the host being ArchLinux on sda1), and (come to think of it) I should have been trying to boot `hd0,3' (/dev/sda3 being where my new installation ought to be) so I edited grub.cfg realising I'd simplistically copied out precisely what the book illustrated. Duh. But good, after some web-searches I'd learned a few more morsels.

But I'm hungry for more, and (I hope) reasonably close. But where do I go from here? I've edited various editables in grub.cfg (hd0,3 and root=/dev/sda3, even sda1!) but short of a different error message (`hd0,3 not found) I'm STUCK at GRUB.

I'm ready to quote/display anything requested, and hoping someone will be gentle with this humble (no, really!) newbie!

And before I go, a global thank-you to all those kind souls who share their knowledge on the web.

Thanks in anticipation ...

Don Pedro · 09-12-2022, 01:12 AM

I'm replying to my own post here: it should have gone to the Linux From Scratch group; this was my (newbie) mistake, and hence the content was not well focused. Also I could not find the post anywhere, and in fact the system told me I had never posted anything. I repeated the whole procedure (to the appropriate group this time) and again I could not find the post, nor could the system. Anyway ... the entire original problem seems to have been with the (fresh and otherwise untested) host installation, where GRUB was not working properly. So I'm going back to Square One, and thus these posts can be ignored. Thanks to those who did (finally) respond. Consequently I'm going to mark this thread SOLVED.

colorpurple21859 · 09-12-2022, 07:17 PM

If the system is on /dev/sda3, This should work:

Code:

menuentry "linux LFS"{
insmod_part_msdos
insmod part_gpt
set root=(hd0,3)
linux /boot/vmlinuz-5.16.9-lfs-11.1 root=/dev/sda3 ro
}

This is short brief of what each line does:

The (insmod part_msdos/gpt) loads grub modules for grub to be able to see the drive partition layout, gpt for gpt drives, msdos for msdos legacy drives.

(set root= ) points grub to the drive/partition where the files/kernel/initrd to be loaded are located. Drives count from 0, partitions from 1.

(linux) line loads kernel and passes parameters to the kernel.

(initrd] loads an initrd/initramfs if one exist.

Don Pedro · 09-13-2022, 02:16 AM

Thanks Colorpurple

As I explained in my followup post, I found GRUB wasn't functioning properly on the Host system, so I'm starting again with a fresh Host installation, and will fully test GRUB before proceeding. But thanks for your advice, which I will implement when I get to that point again.

The whole provided a useful lesson. Thanks Again