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

FathisAeril
Member
Registered: 2010-07-02
Posts: 82

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

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)


It doesn't matter how much training you have. A broken rib is still a broken rib.

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

FathisAeril
Member
Registered: 2010-07-02
Posts: 82

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

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


It doesn't matter how much training you have. A broken rib is still a broken rib.

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

henk
Member
From: Weert, Netherlands
Registered: 2013-01-01
Posts: 334

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

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.

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

FathisAeril
Member
Registered: 2010-07-02
Posts: 82

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

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?


It doesn't matter how much training you have. A broken rib is still a broken rib.

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

FathisAeril
Member
Registered: 2010-07-02
Posts: 82

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

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


It doesn't matter how much training you have. A broken rib is still a broken rib.

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

AndrzejL
Member
Registered: 2012-12-07
Posts: 160

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

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)


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

jmss
Member
From: Lisboa, Portugal
Registered: 2006-10-24
Posts: 42

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

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.


João M. S. Silva

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

jmss
Member
From: Lisboa, Portugal
Registered: 2006-10-24
Posts: 42

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

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


João M. S. Silva

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