I managed to get following config up and running very nicely with an 11.3 installation. But recently I did a clean install of the OS and hoping to preserve my data in the home HD (2TB) partition I did the following operation which resulted in black screen screen with error 15: file not found.
Config: one SSD root (90GB) and swap (30Gb) second HD for home (2TB)
During the installation I reformatted and mounted the SSD with root and swap as above. I left the home HD (2TB) unformatted and mounted as home.
When I did my first boot up, it worked perfectly - Even Fire Fox booted up with my recovered pages as of my last install! However after installing my multi-media codecs, and security updates, etc. to the fresh install I rebooted the system only to discover that I am unable to get past GRUB!
Please if anyone can offer any advice it would be greatly be appreciated. I hope to learn some knowledge here about partitioning so I don’t have to lose my data every time I do a fresh install to new ISO release.
This looks like a small project for when I have a bit more energy. May I ask, what could have caused GRUB to break? And is this a common problem for people with multiple partitions doing re-installs?
What video card do you have? Often black screens are video related.
ATI Radeon™ HD 4250 integrated graphics, I hope this answers your question. Actually this I feel has better support bc the previous generation MB doesn’t have correct resolution settings (using radeonHD) when upgrading to Open Suse 11.3. This current board loaded the resolution just fine with the radeonHD drivers.
Swap size: How much memory do you have? 2X memory is more then enough in most cases.
I only have 2 x 2gb modules. Which gives me plenty of room on the SSD. With this freed up space should I further make a usr, var, etc, partitions?
Reinstalls: this certainly is not a common problem. Also error 15 indicated that the /boot files could not be found.
I just did a clean reinstall formatting all the drives. But now I have same error. I believe the GRUB is indeed broken. So it looks like I have no choice but to fix. I guess it must have been corrupted somehow…In anycase would it be easier to just use the installation CD I received from Gigabyte with my MB?
For SSD there are some tweaks you can make to increase performance and
extend the life of the disk.
The simplest tweak is to mount volumes using the noatime option.
By default Linux will write the last accessed time attribute to files.
This can reduce the life of your SSD by causing a lot of writes. The
noatime mount option turns this off.
Using a ramdisk instead of the SSD to store temporary files will
speed things up, but will cost you a few megabytes of RAM.
Firefox puts its cache in your home partition. By moving this
cache in RAM you can speed up Firefox and reduce disk writes. Complete
the previous tweak to mount /tmp in RAM, and you can put the cache there
as well.
If you have enough RAM to reduce disk writes you may install the
system without a swap partition, with 2 GB of RAM my PC don’t use the
swap partition
VampirD
Microsoft Windows is like air conditioning
Stops working when you open a window.
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Comment: Using GnuPG with SUSE - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
Managed to boot-up PMagic in Failsafe mode, with Xvesa according to your instructions. However when I open the LXTerminal to type “grub” command, the terminal replies “command not found”. Any advice on what is happening here?
Appreciate your quick response and solution! I have two HDs as mentioned above. According to GPart, SDA is 2TB WD HD and SDB is 128GB SSD. When I type in the following code
Grub> find /boot/grub/menu.lst
It returns the following
(hd1,0)
If I type
setup (HD0)
Will result put Grub on SDA or SDB? I am asking because I want to put grub on the SSD for faster boot time. Thanks for your help to clarify.
If you’re booting to an openSuSe command prompt then it might be useful for to look for error messages in
tail n -10 /var/log/messages
tail n -10 /var/log/warn
tail n -10 /var/log/Xorg.0.log
cat /boot/grub/menu.lst
Except for the waste of space for /swap, your partitioning is fine and since you booted into the GUI. Whatever version of updates you installed after the initial install might have changed something. Maybe you installed a new kernel and that changed your grub menu.lst or a new ATI driver that doesn’t work with radeonhd or radeon?
Hi sorry for the long wait in my reply, I have had to put my tech toy away to focus on some issues. But I am now back trying to solve this Grub problem. I am still returning to a black screen with error 15: file not found. I have tried PMagic 4.5 with following settings:
setup (hd1)
this unfortunately has not helped. Although it returns the terminal message
terminal responds with nothing happening only a message saying
Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time
Again no luck here. I also tried reading up at SDB:All about GRUB - openSUSE but am I missing something because it seems to be talking all about Windows partition setups. Without anywhere else to go it would be great to have any advice so I can get my rig working again.