help! everything messed up by grub / something! :(

benji.ijneb · 2009-04-02 21:42:04

just installed arch on a brand new HP pavillion. Partitioned my HD so i have vista, vista restore partition, arch and swap.

I installed grub first onto my main arch partition, but it didn't load, so i then installed it onto the vista partition. when i rebooted, grub loaded and all was good, i could boot into arch and the vista restore thing, which was on (hd0,1) according to grub. however vista i could not boot into, which in grub was supposedly (hd0,0) - it just went immediately back to grub. arch was recognised by grub as (hd0,3)

fdisk -l revealed this:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 4844 38909398+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 29016 30401 11127808 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 4845 5226 3068415 82 linux swap/solaris
/dev/sda4 5227 29015 191085142+ 83 linux

i made linux ext3.

however after shutting down, i now turn on my computer to find that it doesn't even boot to grub, but remains at a flashing underscore waiting for a boot cd to be inserted. gparted on a live cd showed a little exclamation mark next to sda1, showing a series of errors claiming it to be corrupted. i can no longer even boot to the recovery partition. i realise that i could just go ahead and wipe the hard drive, replacing everything with arch, but i don't want to do that! help, please!

thanks for your help in advance...

kaola_linux · 2009-04-03 02:54:59

Try booting archiso and do an fsck on your partitions...
Doing this would give you some options:

fsck --help

Goodluck:)

benji.ijneb · 2009-04-03 09:21:31

thanks!

i tried this, but there were too many errors. in the end i managed to reinstall arch linux and get it to boot from sda4, where i reinstalled grub. i then booted to the recovery drive and reinstalled vista from there. i have now removed my arch partition, as i can no longer access it and i don't want to take the risk of installing grub onto it again. i think i'm in too deep with arch - i really like it, but it's just too difficult. ubuntu 9.04 here i come...

bender02 · 2009-04-03 11:29:01

You can install grub not to a partition, but directly to MBR (master boot record) of your harddrive. I think that's the usual method in your situation. See http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Grub

kaola_linux · 2009-04-03 15:29:16

benji.ijneb wrote:

thanks!
i tried this, but there were too many errors. in the end i managed to reinstall arch linux and get it to boot from sda4, where i reinstalled grub. i then booted to the recovery drive and reinstalled vista from there. i have now removed my arch partition, as i can no longer access it and i don't want to take the risk of installing grub onto it again. i think i'm in too deep with arch - i really like it, but it's just too difficult. ubuntu 9.04 here i come...

As what I've read from your post you only have 2 partitions for your arch / and swap....It would be nice if you could have a separate /boot partition to avoid future errors...I myself on my AA1 has Arch, XP, and Ubuntu 8.10...:) Give arch a try again if you had a chance...:)

benji.ijneb · 2009-04-03 18:25:23

bender02 wrote:

You can install grub not to a partition, but directly to MBR (master boot record) of your harddrive. I think that's the usual method in your situation. See http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Grub

thanks, but i'm pretty sure that the MBR is located on a partition - in this case on the vista partition.

benji.ijneb · 2009-04-03 18:29:44

kaola_linux wrote:

benji.ijneb wrote:
thanks!
i tried this, but there were too many errors. in the end i managed to reinstall arch linux and get it to boot from sda4, where i reinstalled grub. i then booted to the recovery drive and reinstalled vista from there. i have now removed my arch partition, as i can no longer access it and i don't want to take the risk of installing grub onto it again. i think i'm in too deep with arch - i really like it, but it's just too difficult. ubuntu 9.04 here i come...
As what I've read from your post you only have 2 partitions for your arch / and swap....It would be nice if you could have a separate /boot partition to avoid future errors...I myself on my AA1 has Arch, XP, and Ubuntu 8.10...:) Give arch a try again if you had a chance...:)

so, were i to take the risk of installing arch again, which would be ideal, where would I install grub to, without killing vista, but ensuring that i can boot to vista and arch from grub?

flowheat · 2009-04-03 18:33:05

benji.ijneb wrote:

bender02 wrote:
You can install grub not to a partition, but directly to MBR (master boot record) of your harddrive. I think that's the usual method in your situation. See http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Grub
thanks, but i'm pretty sure that the MBR is located on a partition - in this case on the vista partition.

I dual boot with windows vista as well on my HP laptop. The only difference is that I use a separate /boot and my laptop is a 17 incher with two hard drives so I keep Arch on /dev/sdb. For your situation your MBR should just be at sda without any numbers. That's where you want to install grub to and it should be one of the options from the arch installer regardless of how you partition.

benji.ijneb · 2009-04-03 18:38:43

flowheat wrote:

benji.ijneb wrote:
bender02 wrote:
You can install grub not to a partition, but directly to MBR (master boot record) of your harddrive. I think that's the usual method in your situation. See http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Grub
thanks, but i'm pretty sure that the MBR is located on a partition - in this case on the vista partition.
I dual boot with windows vista as well on my HP laptop. The only difference is that I use a separate /boot and my laptop is a 17 incher with two hard drives so I keep Arch on /dev/sdb. For your situation your MBR should just be at sda without any numbers. That's where you want to install grub to and it should be one of the options from the arch installer regardless of how you partition.

great! thanks for your help! i was confused by the option to just install it onto the drive itself in the install last time round...
will that create an extra /boot partition on the HD, or do i need to do that beforehand, or will there be one at all?
also, before i encountered the problem with vista not booting, despite clearly being there. will this solve that?

kaola_linux · 2009-04-03 20:43:37

Here are my grub entries for you to have some reference:

# (3) kernel26-one-dev
title Arch Linux (kernel26-one-dev)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /vmlinuz-one-dev root=/dev/sda6 resume=/dev/sda9 ro

# (0) Arch Linux (stock kernel)
title  Arch Linux (stock kernel)
root   (hd0,4)
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/33315b72-287b-4185-b3c2-31e94ece7ad1 ro
initrd /kernel26.img

# (1) Arch Linux
#title  Arch Linux Fallback
#root   (hd0,4)
#kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/33315b72-287b-4185-b3c2-31e94ece7ad1 ro
#initrd /kernel26-fallback.img

# (2) Ubuntu 
title        Ubuntu 8.10 (stock kernel)
root (hd0,9)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=/dev/sda10 ro quiet splash
initrd        /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-7-generic
quiet

# (2) Windows
title Windows Xp Professional
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Since I've installed Windows Xp before arch, I made sure it resides on the 1st partition so that I can chainload it like above...I think it's possible to chainload vista as well...:) Hope that helps

bender02 · 2009-04-04 08:35:53

@kaola_linux: you can chainload any partition.
@benji.ijneb: MBR is not on a partition, it's at the beginning of the physical disk, independent of any further partitioning. See eg. wikipedia.

benji.ijneb · 2009-04-04 09:41:54

great, thanks for all your help, guys! I think i'll give arch another go - i was sorry to see it leave...

I'm guessing the reason i couldn't boot to vista before is because i messed it up by installing GRUB directly onto it, so it refused to boot. we won't have that problem again

so, i install arch again onto a seperate partition, possibly installing /boot onto a seperate partition as well, but i install grub on sda (or hda?). problem solved.

kaola_linux · 2009-04-05 08:14:08

bender02 wrote:

@kaola_linux: you can chainload any partition.

Thanks for the note..:)

Last edited by kaola_linux (2009-04-05 08:23:28)

benji.ijneb · 2009-04-05 14:03:16

Yay!
it worked!
i'm a happy bunny

caustic386 · 2009-04-15 14:24:24

I use cfdisk to partition my drive - last night I was trying to setup a dual boot XP/Arch, but lilo was already in there from my previous slack install (I don't know why I bother trying other distros, Arch always dominates). The problem I'm having, is that when it gets to the menu "Are you installing grub to a RAID volume? If so, choose 'no' to select another disk." So I select 'yes', because I'm *not* installing to a RAID volume, just a single disk, and then the installation hangs.

one thing that I can't recall about dual booting - when i'm using cfdisk, do I want to set both my XP and my Arch partition to be bootable, or just leave the XP partition marked as bootable?

benji.ijneb · 2009-04-16 18:18:59

caustic386 wrote:

I use cfdisk to partition my drive - last night I was trying to setup a dual boot XP/Arch, but lilo was already in there from my previous slack install (I don't know why I bother trying other distros, Arch always dominates). The problem I'm having, is that when it gets to the menu "Are you installing grub to a RAID volume? If so, choose 'no' to select another disk." So I select 'yes', because I'm *not* installing to a RAID volume, just a single disk, and then the installation hangs.
one thing that I can't recall about dual booting - when i'm using cfdisk, do I want to set both my XP and my Arch partition to be bootable, or just leave the XP partition marked as bootable?

clearly i'm not qualified to answer this but i can give a hand(ish)
why not try selecting yes? give it a shot, live live on the edge, take a chance! i dunno, but to me it sounds liek you should be hitting yes there anyway - it's not very well described
I think it's best to just leave XP bootable, and then install your own bootloader on top of the old lilo (if you can do that).

caustic386 · 2009-04-16 19:21:29

Thanks for the reply - ended up Slackware/lilo had some kind of mystical hold on my MBR. I booted the Slack DVD, deleted the linux partitions, then Arch installed with no hassle.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-04-02 21:42:04

help! everything messed up by grub / something! :(

#2 2009-04-03 02:54:59

Re: help! everything messed up by grub / something! :(

#3 2009-04-03 09:21:31

Re: help! everything messed up by grub / something! :(

#4 2009-04-03 11:29:01

Re: help! everything messed up by grub / something! :(

#5 2009-04-03 15:29:16

Re: help! everything messed up by grub / something! :(

#6 2009-04-03 18:25:23

Re: help! everything messed up by grub / something! :(

#7 2009-04-03 18:29:44

Re: help! everything messed up by grub / something! :(

#8 2009-04-03 18:33:05

Re: help! everything messed up by grub / something! :(

#9 2009-04-03 18:38:43

Re: help! everything messed up by grub / something! :(

#10 2009-04-03 20:43:37

Re: help! everything messed up by grub / something! :(

#11 2009-04-04 08:35:53

Re: help! everything messed up by grub / something! :(

#12 2009-04-04 09:41:54

Re: help! everything messed up by grub / something! :(

#13 2009-04-05 08:14:08

Re: help! everything messed up by grub / something! :(

#14 2009-04-05 14:03:16

Re: help! everything messed up by grub / something! :(

#15 2009-04-15 14:24:24

Re: help! everything messed up by grub / something! :(

#16 2009-04-16 18:18:59

Re: help! everything messed up by grub / something! :(

#17 2009-04-16 19:21:29

Re: help! everything messed up by grub / something! :(

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