[SOLVED] Grub Error "Read or write outside of disk hd0"

FathisAeril · 2013-04-25 21:11:59

Trying to install Arch Linux (as per client request) on an old Seagate Mirra Personal Server. I reflashed the bios to get rid of the Seagate modified ROM and put the standard, stock, VIA bios image on there. Everything boots fine, it boots windows fine. But when I install Arch Linux on the drive and try to boot, it errors out with

Booting...
GRUB Loading.
Welcome to GRUB!

error: attempt to read or write outside of disk 'hd0'.
Entering rescue mode...
grub rescue>

When I ran grub-install and grub-mkconfig during installation neither reported errors or warnings. I'm open to ideas but I need to fix this sooner rather later as this is for a client. A forum thread I found in regards to Ubuntu and grub error 18 said to run:

apt-get remove linux-server
apt-get install linux-386

under Ubuntu and then it would boot. I know Arch removed i386 support a few months ago but im finding it hard to believe that the error above is because of an architecture mismatch. Also I didnt think the CPU in this thing was that old. Hardware Info from the arch live cd says

CPU Vendor: Centaur
CPU Model: VIA Nehemiah
1 core, 64k L2 Cache, 32bit

the Mirra is from 2007 or so, so I expected i686 Arch to be just fine for it.

Ideas???

EDIT:

Wikipedia's Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_C3

States: "Additionally, it implemented the cmov instruction, making it a 686-class processor"

So it shouldn't be an issue of i386 vs i686, right?

Last edited by FathisAeril (2013-04-26 21:46:11)

FathisAeril · 2013-04-26 16:01:07

1day bump, further googling has turned up zero answers so far so im just kind of at a loss for why this is occuring

henk · 2013-04-26 17:06:39

Have you checked the BIOS in regard to limiting the drive size? It looks to me that grub has to boot to a location outside what you
could call drive-size-information it gets from the BIOS.

FathisAeril · 2013-04-26 17:36:52

henk wrote:

Have you checked the BIOS in regard to limiting the drive size? It looks to me that grub has to boot to a location outside what you
could call drive-size-information it gets from the BIOS.

No limit in regards to the drive size is listed in bios. I'm aware that its a newer bios (Seagate modified the bios it shipped with and I put b ack on the official via bios) but this is the same drive that the mirra shipped with and originally had debian on.

Right now its set that / takes the whole drive, if it is an issue of drive size, would grub instead be okay with a smaller partition? like if I put /boot on its own 1gig partition do you think that would have the same effect?

FathisAeril · 2013-04-26 19:28:31

Swapped the 500GB hard drive for a 120GB and retried the install. Install worked fine and booted successfully, so I guess it was just the old limitation of 137.4GB

AndrzejL · 2013-06-04 04:59:12

Good morning to all of You.

Sorry for posting in a [SOLVED] thread but I find the info that I am about to add relevant and I am betting my vital organs that someone else might find it interesting too.

I did an upgrade last night on my Thinkpad 600E. I was not upgrading it for several days (2 weeks tops) as I lost my USB wifi card and had no internet access on this particular machine. So...

As always before upgrade I checked my rss reader for news and sure enough there was a very informative post from Allan (thanks Dude btw.) in there:

https://www.archlinux.org/news/binaries … ervention/

I did as I was told and upgraded in the indicated way. All was peachy till I rebooted to get new kernel to load. I was met with the mentioned error:

error: attempt to read or write outside of disk 'hd0'.

but the second part was slightly different.

Error: You need to load kernel first

SO since the error was different why am I posting here? Because even after Googling the whole error message this post was the first to come up in my search results so I am betting others will get here as well.

Solution? After an hour or so of fighting (I tried booting up from the Arch CD and fscking partitions, reinstalling / reconfiguring grub, downgrading grub-bios and grub-common packages and many many other things) I finally rebooted to the Arch cd, chrooted (for all those that do not know what that means I would like to recommend this link as chrooting is explained in it https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Be … %27_Guide) to the installation and I have reinstalled the linux (kernel) package and redid the image with the:

mkinitcpio -p linux

and rebooted. Turns out that did the trick. Apparently something went wrong during the kernel upgrade. Possibly due to the changes explained in Allan's article. Reinstalling kernel / recreating image did the trick for me.

So if You are still wondering what am I doing here and why am I replying in this thread - the answer is - 99% search results from Google suggests that this error means incompatibility between bios and the hard drive AND there is nothing really out there that I found helpful in this case. I mean it could not be a bios / hdd incompatibility. This drive has been used in this machine for few years and it was running Arch since November 2012... so this just could not be the case. I am just giving a shout to all those that will get this error that there is another option too.

Kind regards. Thanks for reading. My apologies again for sticking my nose in.

Andrzej

Edit: Few months later the same error - fix does not work... Trying to figure it out...

Last edited by AndrzejL (2013-10-19 02:43:15)

jmss · 2013-11-13 21:01:45

AndrzejL wrote:

Sorry for posting in a [SOLVED] thread but I find the info that I am about to add relevant and I am betting my vital organs that someone else might find it interesting too.

This seems the only search result mentioning the two error messages.

AndrzejL wrote:

I did an upgrade last night on my Thinkpad 600E.

I've experienced this in a Compaq Evo N620c DE262A with Fedora 18 and 19.

AndrzejL wrote:

Edit: Few months later the same error - fix does not work... Trying to figure it out...

I think this is related to grub update vs hardware. I'm still trying to fix it.

jmss · 2013-11-14 16:29:59

I think this solves it (adapt to your distro/system as you see fit):

sudo yum remove kernel-3.11.7-200.fc19.i686
sudo yum install kernel-3.11.7-200.fc19.i686
sudo yum upgrade
sudo grub2-install /dev/sda
sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Arch Linux

#1 2013-04-25 21:11:59

[SOLVED] Grub Error "Read or write outside of disk hd0"

#2 2013-04-26 16:01:07

Re: [SOLVED] Grub Error "Read or write outside of disk hd0"

#3 2013-04-26 17:06:39

Re: [SOLVED] Grub Error "Read or write outside of disk hd0"

#4 2013-04-26 17:36:52

Re: [SOLVED] Grub Error "Read or write outside of disk hd0"

#5 2013-04-26 19:28:31

Re: [SOLVED] Grub Error "Read or write outside of disk hd0"

#6 2013-06-04 04:59:12

Re: [SOLVED] Grub Error "Read or write outside of disk hd0"

#7 2013-11-13 21:01:45

Re: [SOLVED] Grub Error "Read or write outside of disk hd0"

#8 2013-11-14 16:29:59

Re: [SOLVED] Grub Error "Read or write outside of disk hd0"

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