Boot Problem with MEPIS

mihaesti · 10-03-2005, 09:54 AM

Hello,
I just downloaded the newest version of MEPIS: sipmlyMEPIS 3.3 from their site and burn it. But when I restart my computer i arrive directly to a promt command (grub> ). I've already installed Mandrake 10.0 on my laptop and it works fine but i want to change. My laptopis an acer 2012WLMI with a ATI radeon 9700; maybe it is because of my graphic card that i don't have any interface.
Also i've searched on the internet but didn't find any help about this problem.

Thanks for your help
Andrei

mihaesti · 10-03-2005, 10:02 AM

I forgot to mention that i already have installed windows xp so i want MEPIS as dual boot.

Thanks

aus9 · 10-08-2005, 08:34 PM

to arrive at the hard drive mbr boot taking you to grub means the cd was not recognised as a bootable device

or you forgot to go back into bios and change your boot order to boot optical drive b4 hard drive.

OR you did not have a good iso image of your new distro to burn so test it with the md5sum program and the related download site should have an output for you to compare and burn as an Image?

mos · 10-08-2005, 09:10 PM

it appears that your problem is that grub doesnt like your bios, a bios update might help but the chances of that are slim. your best bet is to try a distro that uses lilo

mihaesti · 10-09-2005, 05:00 PM

Thanks for your help.
I think there was a problem with the cd because I finally installed SUSE 9.3 with the grub bootloader and everything works fine.
I downloaded the .iso version of SimplyMepis on their site, so it still don't know the problem.....

Andrei

coyopil · 10-14-2005, 08:39 PM

Well, I have a dual-boot system with win98 and Debian, currently Mepis
because GRUB smoked the mbr (it seems it creates an mbr that is different from the one created by DOS).
Mepis was the easiest way to get debian up and running again as quickly as possible.
And the mepis live cd made it possible to mount and read the partitions and save my data although the mbr was destroyed and the machine did not boot neither win or linux :-)
For me the best solution is to boot linux with loadlin, I've learned to stay far away from GRUB.
LILO causes less trouble.

mos · 10-14-2005, 10:22 PM

I think you missunderstand the mbr coyopil. Only one thing can be put on the mbr, you cant have windows and linux on the same mbr. what you can get around that with is called chainloader. Its a built in feature of grub (I'm not as familiar with lilo as I am grub but im almost postive they have the same thing) that alows you to boot up from the bootloader that windows keeps on your hard drive seprate from the mbr.

coyopil · 10-15-2005, 04:20 AM

I definetely understand nothing about the mbr, I have just observed that if you install GRUB and then try to go back to LILO or whatever windows does to the startup sector it does not work on my machine anyway. There certainly is some problem (the partition chain gets corrupted, a scenario I've recreated "successfully" 3 times) and I just use loadlin from dos (I keep win because of OCR and tvtime doesn't work with the cable TV solution they have here).

aus9 · 10-19-2005, 03:57 AM

all mbrs can have mainly these options
no bootloader
a corrupt bootloader or
a working bootloader.

lilo may have been in mbr but can be installed into your target linux partition as well. Ditto grub.

then if you want to, you can have lilo boot to a menu screen that can chainload MS and chainloads to other bootloaders.
Ditto grub.

There is no bootloader yet...that can handle MS and linux direct so which ever bootloader you choose must use a chainloader function even if the MS bootloader calls its something else.

If your lilo was overwritten in the mbr you need to re-write it to the mbr and relink it whereas, once you have grub in the mbr and linked to its bootling files, you just edit the menu.lst file to add entries like MS as per my signature.

Unfortunately everyone likes their own bootloader so its your choice. But you have a wonderful opportunity to learn and hopefully you will see grub is actually more flexible

feel free to read my tutorial and hopefully grub can help

coyopil · 11-22-2005, 05:13 PM

I liked the tutorial, it really covers a lot.

But this solution works for my simple needs, with win98:

I have the kernel and loadlin on c:\
win98 boots to DOS
I use an age-old DOS text mode menu that starts from autoexec.bat and which
gives me the choice of win98 or Linux (loadlin from DOS).

Simple and effective, no risk of trouble with mbr. The simplest solution is the best especially with dual-boot.