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Hi,
yes, I encountered the infamous "invalid extend" error when trying to boot my laptop with grub.
Googling around brought up a lots of threads, but none of which could help.
What I did:
Got an old (~10yo) Sony Vaio Laptop from my Dad which he no longer needs.
The laptop is fine, I tried various Live Linux to check If every bit of hardware is recognized by the Kernel. Everything is working, even WiFi.
Then, I tried to set up Arch as I did many times on my devices.
I followed the installation guide as usual, no problems.
Installed grub for target i386-pc.
Here's the problem:
After powering on the device, I'm dropped to the grub rescue shell with error message:
error: invalid extendNormally, one can use ls in the rescue shell to gather disc information, set up root/prefix and then insmod normal.
But I was not able to list the files in the /boot directory.
This is what I tried:
ls (hd0,1)/This listed all directories in /, and it looks like a normal unix root folder
ls (hd0,1)/grubThis got me another "invalid extend" error message
ls (hd0,1)/etcThis listed the content of /etc. Looked good, thus, my hard drive is basically fine.
It seems like grub cannot access /boot dir.
I used Live images to check content of /boot but it seems all fine.
Any idea on this?
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ls (hd0,1)/grub[...]
ls (hd0,1)/etc
I assume you meant `/boot' in the first command.
A quick `grep -r' in the (latest) grub source reveals that that error message comes from grub-core/fs/ext2.c. Probably, your (root) filesystem is somehow broken. I suggest running `e2fsck -f /dev/ROOT_PART' from a live system.
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isn't i386 32 bit ?
ezik
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isn't i386 32 bit ?
Yes. However, x86_64 is backward compatible with the 32-bit x86 instruction set.
i386-pc is GRUB's default target (on x86_64 with BIOS) and there does not exist a x86_64-pc target.
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isn't i386 32 bit ?
ezik
If your device has still BIOS instead of EFI, i386-pc is the (grub-)target to go for.
@ All: I was able to solve my issue with try & error; I still do not know why it is working now (this leaves me unsatisfied because, you know, I like to know such things).
What I did:
- I switched to GPT partition table instead of MBR and also created a 1M grub partition.
This however did not do the trick, I just got a different error when booting: "invalid arch-independant elf magic" (or the like). Still was welcomed by the rescue shell.
- Then I bootet from live-Stick again and installed grub to /dev/sda1 instead of /dev/sda.
This is something every single guide in the web tells you not to do, but it worked. However, still don't know why.
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I also have grub installed on /dev/sda1 which is mounted as /boot from the beginning, but I have old system with bios and mbr formated hdd.
I first hearing that grub shouldn't be installed to /dev/sda1.
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