No errors from GRUB, LILO but boot sector not recognized

shatteredllama · 04-23-2007, 08:58 PM

I've been installing Gentoo and everything was fine until I got to the boot setup.

First I installed LILO, configured everything as it should be, then ran lilo, which completed without warnings or errors. Upon reboot, the disk did not have the boot loader installed and bailed out to boot from the install cd.

Not to be defeated, I screwed with settings for a while to no avail and decided to try GRUB. Same thing. Everything is set up and grub-install runs and even reports success. However, the same thing happened on reboot.

My boot sector is the first partition on the drive, followed by another partition which houses the root filesystem.

System
------------
Pentium D
Intel 955x motherboard
Sil3114 SATA "RAID" operating in IDE mode
Intel ICH7 "RAID" (currently disconnected)
Western Digital SATA HD

syg00 · 04-23-2007, 09:06 PM

Take the CD out.

shatteredllama · 04-23-2007, 09:14 PM

The hard disk is the first device in the boot order
I have tried with the CD out

syg00 · 04-23-2007, 10:33 PM

Let's see the commands you used to install the loader. Also post the output of this so we can get an idea of what's in the MBR

Code:

dd if=/dev/hda count=1 | strings

(adjust the dev as needed)

Quakeboy02 · 04-23-2007, 10:45 PM

One word: Super Grub Disk. Well, that's three, but you get the idea.