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Somewhat embarrassing this as I am actually a UNIX admin, (Solaris primarily, Linux for a few years) however:
I've just moved countries, so I only have my netbook and my beautiful old laptop with me. I have no spares or accessories to hand, etc.
The laptop is a Japanese Mebius Muramasa (PC-MT1-P5) it has no CD-ROM (supports USB CD) though the BIOS doesn't directly support USB stick booting. It is currently installed with Ubuntu 10.10, (upgraded constantly for 2-3 years, still Grub not Grub2) but that is making it so slow as to be unworkable, (PIII 700, 256MB RAM, 30GB drive) so I figured I'd try Arch 201005 (i686) I know the USB install image works as I re-installed one of my work desktops with Arch from the same stick. So it's "known good" in that respect. I'm typing this from chrome on Arch.
However I cannot get grub on the mebius to load the Arch kernel from the USB stick.
The stick does show up under grub, when you do "root (hd [tab]" which shows the boot disk hd0 and the USB stick hd1
Autocomplete from "root (hd1," gives me (hd1,0) so it knows there is only one partition as there should be, and it does accept the line.
The problems start when I try to find the kernel, if I run it manually it tells me it either can't find the file, or it cant mount the partition. I've enumerated every way of doing this both by direct reference sda1 sdb1, etc, and by label scoped with blkid
If I try to run autocomplete on the kernel line I get grub error 17
blkid tells me the USB is formatted as udf, so I'm wondering if this is a grub problem with supported filesystems?
I though of putting the files into the grub directory on hd(0,2) the Ubuntu install, but I only have the one disk and grub is not a partition, so I suspect If I do that I'll not be able to erase the drive, right?
I'm not averse to changing version of grub on Ubuntu if grub2 will fix my problem, I'm going to wipe it with arch anyway so provided I can get the USB to go live and installed I don't need to get Ubuntu back again.
Anyone seen this before, or know what I'm doing wrong? Any ideas or suggestions?
Solved:
I updated grub to grub2 and I was then able to mount & boot the USB netinstall image, Arch is now installed and the laptop is now much quieter & fair amount faster.
Last edited by praxis22 (2010-11-13 17:15:46)
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