Moved to new hard drive setup, server won't boot

keatts · 2013-01-06 03:01:22

I'm running Arch on an old Dell Dimension 8400. The previous hard drive setup consisted of two 250 gb hard drives, the first one containing /boot, swap, and /, and the other one containing /home. I bought a 3 TB hard drive and redid my setup. Now the first hard drive (250 GB) contains /boot, swap, and /home, and the second hard drive (3 TB) contains /. I copied all files between partitions (I had to do some swapping) using live media, and I used tar so that I'd preserve timestamps and permissions. I also set the boot flag on my /boot partition.

If I look at the drives in gparted, I see /dev/sda[1-3] as /boot, swap, and /home, and /dev/sdb1 as /.

Unfortunately, when I try to boot from the first hard drive, I get nothing. Just a black screen, nothing related to Linux at all. It seems like it's not finding the boot files, but I have no idea how to debug the problem. Can anyone help me out? I'd be happy to provide additional information, and can discuss my issue on IRC if that would help.

Trilby · 2013-01-06 03:08:06

Is the bootloader showing? If not, are you sure the bios boot priority is still for the 250GB disk? If so, what bootloader are you using, and are you using UUIDs or block device names?

keatts · 2013-01-06 06:27:13

It shouldn't be a boot priority issue, because the problem exists even when I explicitly choose to boot off of the hard drive. I'm using GRUB2, and I think it's using block device names, but it's not actually getting to GRUB, so I'm not sure if that's relevant to the problem.

DSpider · 2013-01-06 10:43:58

GRUB doesn't care about the boot flag.

I think you forgot to mount the boot partition when you installed Arch, like you were supposed to:

First, mount the root partition on /mnt. Following the example above (yours may be different), it would be:
# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
Then mount the /home partition and any other separate partition (/boot, /var, etc), if you have any:

Now if you mount just the root partition (and nothing else), you'll probably see a /boot folder in there with GRUB, the kernel and the initramfs images. What you can do in this case, is go into the BIOS and adjust the boot priority so that the 3 TB drive is the first one to boot. By the way, a 3 TB root partition is a bad idea. Things could get slow over time when the system spreads over the entire drive, with system updates and such. It shouldn't be more than 10-15 GB, IMO. But that also depends on how much crap you install. Full-blown KDE and a bunch of games will quickly fill it up.

keatts · 2013-01-06 18:27:49

I definitely mounted the boot partition when I installed Arch. As I said, my old configuration with two 250 GB drives worked fine.

While I was poking around, something occurred to me. My computer doesn't support EFI boot, and the 3 TB hard drive is partitioned with GPT. This is why I put my /boot partition on my 250 GB drive. So, now my question is: will my computer be able to boot without EFI support if the / partition is GPT and the /boot partition is MBR? If that's not the issue then I'll have to keep poking around. If it is, I'll just make my / partition be on the 250 GB hard drive and make the 3 TB hard drive /srv, where most of my data is.

WonderWoofy · 2013-01-06 20:12:44

No that should not matter. You can mix and match MBR GPT partitioning as much as you like. Also contrary to what the windows world will tell you, gpt/bios and mbr/uefi work just fine in Linux.

keatts · 2013-01-07 07:10:13

I mounted my partitions and regenerated my fstab and syslinux config file. Everything works now. Not entirely sure what was wrong before, but thanks everyone for helping.

WonderWoofy · 2013-01-07 07:13:20

Honestly, we all f*ck up sometimes. The problem you describe really did sound exactly like you did not mount your /boot when you thought you did.

Edit: BTW, welcome to the forums. Since your post is now solved, you may mark it as such by editing the first post and then prepending [Solved] to the title.

Last edited by WonderWoofy (2013-01-07 07:14:11)

Arch Linux

#1 2013-01-06 03:01:22

Moved to new hard drive setup, server won't boot

#2 2013-01-06 03:08:06

Re: Moved to new hard drive setup, server won't boot

#3 2013-01-06 06:27:13

Re: Moved to new hard drive setup, server won't boot

#4 2013-01-06 10:43:58

Re: Moved to new hard drive setup, server won't boot

#5 2013-01-06 18:27:49

Re: Moved to new hard drive setup, server won't boot

#6 2013-01-06 20:12:44

Re: Moved to new hard drive setup, server won't boot

#7 2013-01-07 07:10:13

Re: Moved to new hard drive setup, server won't boot

#8 2013-01-07 07:13:20

Re: Moved to new hard drive setup, server won't boot

Board footer