On Friday 24 August 2007, Marc Joliet wrote: > Hi, > > After the reboot following my daily upgrade from yesterday - during > which a revised kernel was installed - GRUB just wouldn't finish > starting. It's attempt to start looked like this: > > GRUB _ > > with the underscore blinking. Ctrl-alt-del (reboot) worked.
At that stage you should have checked if the symlink /boot/grub/menu.lst is still there and, or if its permissions were messed up. > Now, to make it clear, I solved that: after finding out that I could > make a bootable GRUB CD, I made one from within a live-CD (c't > Knoppicillin 5.2). I was then able to boot into Gentoo with it and > reinstalled GRUB into the MBR. Don't you just love GRUB ;-)? > > What I *do* want to know, however, is how the hell the MBR could have > been wrecked in the first place. I doubt that the MBR was wrecked, because if it were wrecked you wouldn't see the Grub prompt and would just get a BIOS message. > All I did was install the new > kernel/initramfs via > > $ genkernel --lvm2 --symlink --install all [1] > > , edit grub.conf appropriately and reboot. It worked flawlessly until > now. Is Genkernel known to cause anything like this? Sorry, can't help with this because I have no genkernel experience . . . > Also, just to understand the issue better, am I correct in assuming that > GRUB *always* installs its stage1 into the MBR or a boot sector (unless > you install it onto a floppy or CD)? I know it's a stupid question, but > I want to be sure that it was in the MBR in the first place, in the > event that there was a completely different cause. If it helps, this was > originally a Sabayon 3.20 install. A lot has changed since the initial > install, though ;-). I have no experience with Sabayon either, but Grub will install wherever you tell it to install. That can be in the Master Boot Record (e.g. system (hd0,0) or in any partition's boot record (e.g. system (hd0,1). > Of course, it could just be random disk corruption, but I sure hope not. It could be a semi-random fs corruption, if e.g. you run out of juice, or there was a hard crash, while that file was being read/written. If your /boot is not mounted by default then that's probably unlikely. If the machine is a laptop, or someone kicked the box while the disk was spinning then things could go bad this way too. -- Regards, Mick
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
