Arch Linux

Elmaron

Member

Registered: 2009-05-02

Posts: 11

[solved] Grub not starting

I installed grub to /dev/sda when completing installation (my local HDD of my laptop) and when rebooting, I simply get a black screen with a blinking cursor after the BIOS popup. No grub starting. What do I do?
Grub was installed by the archlinux installer. As I want to use encrypted partitions with luks (and also set them up as the luks guide says), I edited the menu.lst line for archlinux to:

kernel /vmlinuz26 cryptdevice=/dev/sda2:root root=/dev/mapper/root ro

And then I just installed grub to /dev/sda. The machine is an Eee PC 1000H from Asus.

What I noticed is, after the BIOS screen disappears and grub should be loaded, the cursor on the black screen blinks first at the very top left edge, and then, after a fracture of a second, jumps into the second line and blinks there. Then nothing. No idea what that means, probably tried to start grub and failed or something.

I already had a previous arch installation (without encrypted /dev/sda2 (mount point /) or /dev/sda3 (mount point /home) which I have now), and there grub worked fine. Also, the /boot dir is an extra ext3 formatted unencrypted partition of >500mb size at /dev/sda1, so I hope the encryption is not an issue for grub itself not starting up.

Any hints appreciated.

Last edited by Elmaron (2009-09-26 14:14:51)

Elmaron

Member

Registered: 2009-05-02

Posts: 11

Re: [solved] Grub not starting

No idea how I did that but I got it working I think I should do the installation another 5 times, so I get everything completely right, lol. Something must have been damaged, but I don't know what it was or why, doing the installation again fixed it.