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#26 2012-07-28 22:28:00

cmlr
Member
From: Rochester, NY, USA
Registered: 2007-04-18
Posts: 99

Re: [solved] syslinux woes: the return of grub

I tried olive's suggestion, and it works.  I had the same problem, syslinux would not start, and gave the error message MISSING OPERATING SYSTEM.  I checked and found that my boot partition started at sector 1.  Then I fixed the problem on 2 computers, and now they both work beautifully.  I followed these steps, similar to olive's suggestions (note that I have a separate boot partition):

1.  cp -a /boot /boot.bak

2.  Boot with a rescue disk, and use cfdisk to delete the /boot partition and recreate it.  Then mount partitions, chroot into the mounted partitions, and use the command
cp -a /boot.bak/* /boot
Also use this command to update syslinux
/usr/sbin/syslinux-install_update -iam

3.  Adjust /etc/fstab if necessary.

My installations are several years old, and I believe that the version of cfdisk from that time started partitions at sector 1 instead of sector 63.

Last edited by cmlr (2012-07-28 23:51:47)

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#27 2012-10-14 14:13:15

Urfaust
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2009-01-30
Posts: 164

Re: [solved] syslinux woes: the return of grub

cmlr wrote:

I tried olive's suggestion, and it works.  I had the same problem, syslinux would not start, and gave the error message MISSING OPERATING SYSTEM.  I checked and found that my boot partition started at sector 1.  Then I fixed the problem on 2 computers, and now they both work beautifully.  I followed these steps, similar to olive's suggestions (note that I have a separate boot partition):

1.  cp -a /boot /boot.bak

2.  Boot with a rescue disk, and use cfdisk to delete the /boot partition and recreate it.  Then mount partitions, chroot into the mounted partitions, and use the command
cp -a /boot.bak/* /boot
Also use this command to update syslinux
/usr/sbin/syslinux-install_update -iam

3.  Adjust /etc/fstab if necessary.

My installations are several years old, and I believe that the version of cfdisk from that time started partitions at sector 1 instead of sector 63.

I just wish to say "Thanks!". This saved my life. Had the exact same problem as described here.
Trying to switch from grub-legacy to grub failed with

/usr/sbin/grub-bios-setup: warning: Embedding is not possible.  GRUB can only be installed in this setup by using blocklists.  However, blocklists are UNRELIABLE and their use is discouraged..
/usr/sbin/grub-bios-setup: error: will not proceed with blocklists.

then I tried syslinux an ran into

MISSING OPERATION SYSTEM

after that I noticed that my first partition also started at sector 1, I also have a separate /boot partition.
So thanks again, its working now. Do you switched from mbr to GPT partition table also? Thats what I want to try next. big_smile

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#28 2012-10-29 16:02:33

karol
Archivist
Registered: 2009-05-06
Posts: 25,440

Re: [solved] syslinux woes: the return of grub

karol wrote:

I think I'm just going to reinstall Arch in a month or two. I'm still using ext3 for /home and / and ext4 would be nice to have.
grub works for now and syslinux seems the way to go with the new install.

I've reinstalled Arch on one of my computers (everything bootloader-related went fine), so I guess I can finally mark this thread as solved ;P

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