Boot failure

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi,
I’m new to Opensuse so please forgive my ignorance on Linux matters.
I had recently installed Opensuse 11.1 which booted fine with windows xp off of IDE HDD. I have just installed Nvidia legacy driver to enable desktop effects which gave a new Opensuse option in boot menu as I think a new kernel was established when legacy Nvidia driver was installed. Windows XP and both Opensuse versions booted fine. I then set the default boot option to the new Opensuse (Nvidia driver) version, however the PC now gives a boot failure as it says-
“Searching for Boot Record from IDE-0…OK
Error No operating system”

I’m not sure if this is a hardware issue as the PC is very old and kind of temperamental. I had also inserted a bluetooth dongle at same time as next boot up not thinking anything was wrong with boot up.

Could this problem be to do with the boot options or Grub having changed default boot OS?

I’d like to know if this is familiar to anyone as a software issue. If not I can rule it out and check hardware.
Many thanks and regards:)

2

First step - remove the dongle, and see if that boots. Some USB devices will play havoc, although that seems very unlikely, as you’d expect it to get past grub.

Worth noting that on the grub boot menu (if it gets that far?), if you press escape, it’ll drop you to text mode. You can then pick a line and press ‘e’ to edit it, so maybe try playing around with the values (nothing you change here is permanent, it’s just for that boot), then press escape again, and ‘b’ for boot.

Maybe copy down the lines that appear after you’ve hit ‘e’ and post them here, we can see if there are any syntax errors…

If you can make it boot doing that, you can fix the actual menu.

If not, it’ll be easier to proceed if you have a linux live CD. Do you? If not, can you make one?

3

Further to that; if you can get to grub text mode, there’s a key to get to the grub command line (might well be ‘c’. It should say). Do so, and type


find /boot/grub/stage1

or possibly


find /boot/grub/menu.lst

(they should produce the same output - never hurts to try different ways…). Tell us what that says, in comparison to what it says when you hit ‘e’ for edit (making sure that you scroll along the lines, because some may be wider than the screen) and we may well be in business…

4

Hi,
Many thanks for your reply.

I tried to boot without dongle but it stalled again.

Unfortunately I can’t get as far as grub boot menu, I have inserted an image showing how far I can get as follows-

<a href=“http://s672.photobucket.com/albums/vv87/UTzn/?action=view&current=DSC00414.jpg” target="_blank"><img src=“http://i672.photobucket.com/albums/vv87/UTzn/DSC00414.jpg” border=“0” alt=“Photobucket”></a>

and also viewable at http://i672.photobucket.com/albums/vv87/UTzn/DSC00414.jpg

I’m not sure if this is a grub issue or a hardware issue when the firmware is mentioned on the screen.

I have an Opensuse Live CD.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.

5

Load the Live CD, and open a terminal. Type ‘su’, (it may ask for a password - if it does you should be able to guess it (root, suse, suselive, linux… something) or google it) being aware that you are now root, and therefore have very few safeguards - don’t type anything random to see what it does ;).

Type


fdisk -l
grub
find /boot/grub/stage1
quit

And return the output. Then type ‘exit’ twice to get out of the terminal, or just close it. How many hard drives does the computer have?

6

Hi,
Thanks for your reply and help.

I’ve done what you requested and this is the information returned-

**
linux@linux:~> su
linux:/home/linux # fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 30.0 GB, 30020272128 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3649 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xcc9bcc9b

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 1594 12803773+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2 1595 1603 72292+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 * 1604 3649 16434495 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 3558 3649 738958+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 1604 2385 6281352 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 2386 3557 9414058+ 83 Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order
linux:/home/linux # grub
Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.

GNU GRUB  version 0.97  (640K lower / 3072K upper memory)

Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For the first word, TAB
lists possible command completions. Anywhere else TAB lists the possible
completions of a device/filename. ]
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
find /boot/grub/stage1
(hd0,5)
grub> quit
quit
linux:/home/linux #**

I have one 30Gb IDE HDD which contains all of above. I did get a warning occasionally when using Yast updater that the hard disk space was running low.

I think the Linux file system partition is SDA6 and that was at 40%, the personal documents partition of SDA 7 was at 8%, and the SDA2 partition was at 90%. The swap file of SDA2 is 720Mb. SDA1 contains Windows XP.

Many thanks for your help with this.:slight_smile:

7

Correction - you have to press return after you’ve changed something, not escape.

Sorry - ignore that, just trying not to leave a trail of gibberish in my wake. :wink:

Open a terminal in your live CD, and run


su -
mkdir /mnt/suse
mount /dev/sda6 /mnt/suse
cat /mnt/suse/boot/grub/menu.lst

Paste the output. We can have a look at the contents of your boot menu, although it isn’t actually getting that far, it’s worth checking.

Final important question - there’s nothing on this system (either on Windows or SUSE) you desperately need to save? If there is, now would be the time to save it - and that’s certainly possible. The next step, reinstalling the bootloader, should be safe, but ‘should be’ is a relative term, especially when computers are involved… :wink:

8

Hi,
I’ve run terminal and code and this is output-

**linux@linux:~> su
linux:/home/linux # mkdir /mnt/suse
linux:/home/linux # mount /dev/sda6 /mnt/suse
linux:/home/linux # cat /mnt/suse/boot/grub/menu.lst

Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Tue Sep 8 21:15:46 BST 2009

default 0
timeout 8
##YaST - generic_mbr
gfxmenu (hd0,5)/boot/message
##YaST - activate

###Don’t change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title openSUSE 11.1 - 2.6.27.29-0.1
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27.29-0.1-pae root=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST330621A_6EE03028-part6 resume=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST330621A_6EE03028-part5 splash=silent showopts vga=0x317
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.27.29-0.1-pae

###Don’t change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: failsafe###
title Failsafe – openSUSE 11.1 - 2.6.27.29-0.1
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27.29-0.1-pae root=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST330621A_6EE03028-part6 showopts ide=nodma apm=off noresume nosmp maxcpus=0 edd=off powersaved=off nohz=off highres=off processor.max_cstate=1 x11failsafe vga=0x317
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.27.29-0.1-pae

###Don’t change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title openSUSE 11.1
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27.7-9-default root=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST330621A_6EE03028-part6 resume=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST330621A_6EE03028-part5 splash=silentshowopts vga=0x317
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.27.7-9-default

###Don’t change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: windows 1###
title windows 1
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

###Don’t change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: windows 2###
title windows 2
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

###Don’t change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: floppy###
title Floppy
rootnoverify (fd0)
chainloader +1

###Don’t change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: failsafe###
title Failsafe – openSUSE 11.1
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27.7-9-default root=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST330621A_6EE03028-part6 showopts ide=nodma apm=off noresume nosmp maxcpus=0 edd=off powersaved=off nohz=off highres=off processor.max_cstate=1 x11failsafe vga=0x317
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.27.7-9-default
linux:/home/linux #
**

After I had installed Nvidia driver I think there was another boot option on the list than the usual. It was using the new option I was able to enable desktop effects and then tried to set this option as default boot item when I seem to have problems. I’m not sure if this helps.

Fortunately I had cloned my Windows XP partition to a separate HDD not connected to this PC and have a backup. I was just trying Opensuse so I don’t have any documents I need in those partitions.

I much appreciate your help.:slight_smile:

9

Just for your information: the NVIDIA driver does in no way touch any of your boot configuration files.

10

No worries. Don’t thank me yet - we haven’t fixed anything. :slight_smile:

Well, my guess would be to open your live CD terminal, and do


su -
grub
root (hd0,5)
setup (hd0)
quit

That should put a fresh bootloader on the system, and that menu looks like it should work (although it could perhaps use a spring clean - it seems to think you have Windows twice, for example). Reboot, and see what happens…

11

Success rotfl!
That’s fixed it perfectly.
It’s working great again.

Thanks a million.

I think the second windows xp option was leftover from trying to boot a second HDD I had installed some time ago and was left in windows boot loader at the time.

I’ll remember the process you showed for future reference.

Thank you again.lol!

12

Glad to be of assistance. :slight_smile:

Remember, if you type ‘man [command]’ in a terminal, it’ll give you the manual entry for that command (you can even type ‘man man’ if that kind of recursive humour appeals…). This is more useful than looking it up on the net, because it’s specific to the version installed on your distro.

Using the man pages, you should have a fair bet of working out what we just did - none of it was especially complicated (perhaps the most confusing thing is that grub numbers things from 0, while the linux filesystem numbers them from 1, so sda6 is hd0,5). Have a read through, and if anything doesn’t make sense feel free to ask.

Still very puzzled as to how your bootloader got fried in the first place - but hey, it happens… :wink:

Happy SUSEing!

13

One other small thing of note - find, quit, root and setup are grub commands, so anything you find in man about those isn’t going to be about the same command you were using. If you’re interested, read about those in ‘info grub’, or just google for one of the many grub tutorials.