error: no such device: GRUB problem

MasterM1nd · 2014-12-26 14:23:36

Hi,

I'll put all the details of how I installed and what problem I am facing.
I mainly followed this tutorial: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNfBXuqdNB8

In that tutorial the author shows dual booting with Windows 7, I was trying with Windows XP.

My HDD: 149 Gb

First I shrinked my primary partition on windows to 100Gb and 49GB for ArchLinux.
Then I just installed it following the directions in the video, everything was going good.

There were two partitions (sda1 and sda2). My linux was on sda2.

Then the author in the video said, he is going to install some packages. I didn't do that (I just run pacman -Sy {something like that, got it from google I think}). After installing packages, he installed GRUB.

grub-install /dev/sda

Then OS-PROBER

pacman -S os-prober

Then I run the os-prober

Then he run this command:

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

I also did that, everything was working great. After unmounting, He rebooted the pc and it showed him boot loader where he can choose between Windows 7 and Arch Linux.

In my case, when I rebooted. I was presented with the following:

GRUB loading.
Welcome to GRUB!
error: no such device: 01a7cc0-6a79-468d-8a1b-4fbce6ba38a0
Entering rescue mode...
grub rescue >

I run

ls

and got the following input:

(hd0) (fd0)

Well my PC is old so I have to use PloP boot manager to boot from USB. That's why I have a burnt plop boot manager on a CD and have kept it (It helps me ).
If I don't have that then I can't boot into windows too.

I rebooted my PC and PloP boot manager was showing two partitions on Hard Drive.
HD partition 1 has windows
HD partition 2 has arch linux

It successfully boots into windows (Through PLop boot manager) but if I try to boot into HD Partition 2 (Arch Linux). It gives some type of error like Invalid boot sector, continuing booting and then comes on the main menu of PLoP boot manager.

Please help, How can I fix it ?
Note: I don't have windows cd

Head_on_a_Stick · 2014-12-26 14:50:08

Go right back to the beginning and use the only guide that is applicable to Arch:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_guide

Using a random YouTube guide is an insult to the many Archers who have contributed their time and effort to ensuring the above linked guide is up-to-date and correct.

Coming here and asking for help after using a random guide is just taking the p**s...

I don't know which specific errors the author of your "guide" made (I don't have time to watch a 23 minute video), but I'm sure there were many.

Follow the Beginner's Guide to the letter -- if you still have problems, post them here along with the steps you have taken up to that point.

If you are unable to follow the peerless Beginner's Guide, you should not be using Arch.

Just for the record, you shouldn't use `pacman -Sy` without updating your system -- it will break Arch.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pa … nsupported

MasterM1nd · 2014-12-26 14:54:36

Well let me tell you that I have read all the guides (Beginners, Installation, Dual Booting, Burning on USB etc) on Arch wiki and after that I watched the video. I think I've used pacman -Sy but It's not that problem.

Problem is with boot loader

TheSaint · 2014-12-26 14:55:48

Maybe you miss a bit reading here or maybe you didn't mention it.
The first step, you mostly lost it, was to save your MBR. Because the boot loader will write its own. If it was the windows one then now you should have grub in it.
Having the MBR saved, you could go back to the original boot loader.
For more troubleshooting you may see here. But in particular you need to pay attention to create/modify the grub.cfg to address the windows boot loader and put one more entry for it.
If you don't realize you purpose there are several thread on the forum, very recent.
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=190818
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=191305
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=190456
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=189195
And some contained link.

I would advise to avoid these youtube wizardry, more reliable an up to date guidelines are written in the wiki

Head_on_a_Stick · 2014-12-26 14:56:02

If you've read them, why didn't you follow them?

For example, what is your partition table type?

MasterM1nd · 2014-12-26 15:15:33

TheSaint wrote:

Maybe you miss a bit reading here or maybe you didn't mention it.
The first step, you mostly lost it, was to save your MBR. Because the boot loader will write its own. If it was the windows one then now you should have grub in it.
Having the MBR saved, you could go back to the original boot loader.
For more troubleshooting you may see here. But in particular you need to pay attention to create/modify the grub.cfg to address the windows boot loader and put one more entry for it.
If you don't realize you purpose there are several thread on the forum, very recent.
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=190818
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=191305
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=190456
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=189195
And some contained link.
I would advise to avoid these youtube wizardry, more reliable an up to date guidelines are written in the wiki

hmmm, don't know . How to do that? Well I make the Linux partition (sda2) bootable itself...

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:

If you've read them, why didn't you follow them?
For example, what is your partition table type?

I read them and also followed some part of it. The reason I watched the tutorial is because I was unsure about partitioning for dual booting...

So Do I have to remove it and install again ?

Trilby · 2014-12-26 15:16:11

Mastermind, you certainly haven't gotten a warm welcome in this thread. That is unfortunate - but not entirely unexpected. Put yourself in our shoes: you've really not given us much to work with.

You follow some guide which we don't know the contents of. Then you run some commands that you got "from google or something" but you don't remember what they were. You got error messages, but you don't report what the actual error was.

One thing you will learn with arch that I don't often see in other distro's communities is that error messages mean a lot - we need to see them. Also, troubleshooting on these forums generally takes a much more systematic approach then on some other distros forums where it is mostly guess-and-check. To proceed in a systematic and functional way, we need to know what you have actually done, otherwise we have no idea what state your machine is in.

While wiping an install and starting fresh is rarely recommended nor needed, in this case that's what I'd suggest. Start from scratch, follow the beginner's guide (and other pages linked from it) and if you run into any stumbling blocks then you can post here and we can be much more helpful - you'll then be able to tell us what step in the beginner's guide you are at, and we will have an idea what state your machine is in. We can then provide helpful diagnostics and solutions.

EDIT: The above was cross posted with your last post. Do you have to wipe it and start again? No you probably don't have to, but we will be able to help you best if you do. Again, don't hesitate to stop along the way of following the recomended guide to ask questions: we can help with those questions.

EDIT2: Many of us have also seen countless cases of someone using some other guide for installing (e.g. on youtube) to an apparent success, but then much later down the road something they screwed up in the beginning comes back to haunt them. It is much easier to start from scratch now to ensure everything is done right. I'd even go so far (as a community member, not a moderator) to say that any archer that makes such youtube videos is doing a disservice to the community, and they should be ashamed.

Last edited by Trilby (2014-12-26 15:17:50)

MasterM1nd · 2014-12-26 15:55:31

The below is the whole stuff which I did (including all commands that I've run). If still you guys failed to understand then no problem, I'll wipe it up and start from scratch again . Trilby I didn't got any error that I could share, that error (GRUB rescue) only comes when I rebooted the PC to check.

HDD: 149 GB

I resized my primary partition and shrinked windows to 100GB and for Linux I chose 49GB (On Windows, it was showing as un-allocated space).

I booted into Arch Linux.

I run the command

cfdisk

There were two things:

sda1 and Free space

Sda1 was bootable. It had Windows
I hover on the Free space and choose New then It asks me for size (It automatically showed 49G) so I pressed enter. Then It asks me that I want Primary or Extended. I chose Primary
On Pressing Enter, It was given the name sda2.
Now I again hover it and choose Bootable and press enter.

Now there were two partitions (SDA1 and SDA2). Both were bootable.

Then I choose the write option (While hovering on sda2). It asks me that I want to write the partition table to disk? I typed yes and pressed Enter.
Then I close the cfdisk (by pressing Q) and It again came back to

root@archiso ~ #

I typed

fdisk -l

and confirmed that System was Linux on sda2

Then I run the following command:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2

Then I mounted:

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt

Then

ls /mnt

and it showed me lost+found.

Then I had to install GRUB, I tried installing through

pacman -S grub

but it was giving error like it was not able to connect to databases. I searched on it and founded answers on Stackoverflow and I also founded a thread. Answers on both were pretty much same. The answers were, I had to use

pacman -Syy

So I do that and it solved the problem.
Then I installed GRUB by

pacman -S grub

After it downloaded, I installed it

grub-install /dev/sda

and no error, It says Installation finished. No error reported.

Then I run

pacman -S os-prober

to get os-prober.
It asked me proceed with installation, I typed Y and it was also great. No errors.

Then I run

os-prober

It shows me that No such file or directory but on second last line, it showed /dev/sda1 Windows XP:windows chain
I come to know that it founded it.

Then I run

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

and again It says done...

Then I unmounted

umount /mnt

and on rebooting I got the error given in my first post.

Last edited by MasterM1nd (2014-12-26 15:56:12)

Lone_Wolf · 2014-12-26 17:32:04

Then I had to install GRUB, I tried installing through

That's the point where you went wrong.

from the beginner's guide :

2.4 Mount the partitions
2.5 Select a mirror
2.6 Install the base system
2.7 Generate an fstab
2.8 Chroot and configure the base system

    2.8.1 Locale
    2.8.2 Console font and keymap
    2.8.3 Time zone
    2.8.4 Hardware clock
    2.8.5 Kernel modules
    2.8.6 Hostname

2.9 Configure the network

    2.9.1 Wired
        2.9.1.1 Dynamic IP
        2.9.1.2 Static IP
    2.9.2 Wireless
        2.9.2.1 Adding wireless networks
        2.9.2.2 Connect automatically to known networks
    2.9.3 Analog modem, ISDN or PPPoE DSL

2.10 Create an initial ramdisk environment
2.11 Set the root password
2.12 Install and configure a bootloader

You did 2.4 , then jumped to 2.12 and skipped everything in between.

+1 vote for starting from scratch and following the beginner's guide.

Head_on_a_Stick · 2014-12-26 20:26:01

MasterM1nd wrote:

it was giving error like it was not able to connect to databases. I searched on it and founded answers on Stackoverflow and I also founded a thread. Answers on both were pretty much same. The answers were, I had to use
pacman -Syy

I will say this once more: those "answers" will ruin your system -- never use `pacman -Syy` without also upgrading your system.

Always use:

# pacman -Syyu

If you have to force a database update.

ArchWiki wrote:

Do not use pacman -Sy package or any equivalent such as pacman -Sy and then pacman -S package. Always upgrade before installing a package -- particularly if pacman has refreshed the sync repositories.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pa … nsupported

Anyway, @Lone_Wolf is right.

Just out of interest, how old is the Arch .iso you have used for this?
Always use the most recent image -- new images are pushed out on the first of every month.

Trilby · 2014-12-26 20:42:19

Also, you should not use pacman within the installation iso. You should use pacstrap to install all the packages you need. Or you'd use pacman once you have chrooted into the new install. In any case, the advice remains: start from scratch, and do it right. Then feel free to put a nasty comment on that youtube video about how much of your time it wasted.

EDIT: I just sat through that video. It skips the entire installation process. So it seems the MasterM1nd followed that video faithfully - and that is precisely the problem. MasterM1nd, that tutorial is a f***ing joke - it will not work.

Last edited by Trilby (2014-12-26 20:49:12)

Issa · 2014-12-26 20:53:52

Hey MasterMind,

After going through a lot of of unknown steps and stuff duing my attempts to install arch on my second machine, I second the recommendation to start from scratch and follow the quite impressive beginners guide.
After the second or third (failed) attempt I also started to write down every command that I entered, to be able to remember when things went wrong. I also started working out how to create system backups, to be able to reset the system easily to defined states, to win time and be more free to just break things.

MasterM1nd · 2014-12-26 21:46:11

Lone_wolf, Thank you for telling .

Head_on_a_stick, Got it! I've downloaded the most recent which is available on Downloads page.

Trilby, Hmmm. Yea I also realized that he leave many steps (after starting from scratch { Beginners guide })

Issa, Yea I do everything from scratch this time.

So, as everyone was recommending me to start from scratch while installing Beginners guide. I do so. I deleted the partition and started everything from start. Now I realized that the author in the video miss many step like fstab, mkinitcpio -p linux etc...

Now, I have followed each and every step shown in Beginners guide. I've also downloaded the base system which almost took a hour (BAD CONNECTION). Setted all the time/hostname/password/etc. This time I was doing that all stuff later after partitioning in chroot (Last time I was not in chroot). But the problem is now a little bit changed.

Now after installing grub, making grub.cfg file (I also used OS-PROBER). And rebooting, It showed me the following error:

GRUB Loading
Welcome to GRUB!
error: invalid arch-independent ELF magic
Entering rescue mode...
grub rescue >

On typing

ls

It showed me the following stuff:

(hd0) (hd0,msdos3) (hd0,msdos2) (hd0,msdos1) (fd0)

I'm again mentioning that I have performed all the steps (created swap etc). But I've not created separate partitions for home and root. I have created only two partitions, 1 for swap and other for root (and everything). I don't think it's the problem.

Again I can boot into Windows by using Plop boot manager but when I try to boot into the partition of Linux (through PLoP) it shows me:

WARNING:
No Valid BOOTSECTOR SIGNATURE
CONTINUE BOOTING [Y/N]

On typing y, nothing happens.

If you want the codes again which I used, I can provide that too ... But I'm pretty much sure that I've not left anything which I do last time.

Last edited by MasterM1nd (2014-12-26 21:49:40)

Head_on_a_Stick · 2014-12-26 23:52:40

MasterM1nd wrote:

Now after installing grub, making grub.cfg file (I also used OS-PROBER).

Please post the exact commands you used to do this.

TheSaint · 2014-12-27 03:20:27

Lone_Wolf wrote:

+1 vote for starting from scratch and following the beginner's guide.

I feel he was just like my wife cooking a recipe. She just read the pictures

Issa · 2014-12-27 10:15:03

Hey MAsterM1nd,

what exactly do you mean with:

MasterM1nd wrote:

Lone_wolf, Thank you for telling .
[...] This time I was doing that all stuff later after partitioning in chroot (Last time I was not in chroot). But the problem is now a little bit changed.

It sounds like you partitioned your hdd after installing arch?

If your installation was successfull, you should be able to see your system when booting with install medium and mounting the correct partition

(after starting)

# lsblk or blkid

(to identify relevant partition)

# mkdir /mnt/arch

(to create mountpoint for linux partition)

# mount /dev/[sd?]  /mnt/arch/

[?] stands for partition identified in first step

# ls -l /mnt/arch/

this should show you the basic file structure

Last edited by Issa (2014-12-27 10:17:34)

MasterM1nd · 2014-12-27 13:46:05

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:

MasterM1nd wrote:
Now after installing grub, making grub.cfg file (I also used OS-PROBER).
Please post the exact commands you used to do this.

Sure, The commands which I used to install GRUB and OS-PROBER are:

Note: I was in CHROOT (so that it could give me full system access).

pacman -S grub-bios

grub-install /dev/sda

It said, Installation finished. No error reported

Then I downloaded and installed OS-PROBER:

pacman -S os-prober

os-prober

It also detected Windows XP!

After it, I make the GRUB cfg file:

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Then I do:

mkinitcpio -p linux

after doing that, I thought I may be created the configuration file first But I have to do it after using the above command, so I once again do that:

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

It was also done nicely, It also said done!

Then I typed exit (to exit from chroot).

Then I used fstab command:

genfstab /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab

then I unmounted:

umount /mnt

and then rebooted and

Issa, nope. I first created a partition (root and swap) and later after configuring them, Installed Arch on Root!
And I can't boot into Arch...

Head_on_a_Stick · 2014-12-27 13:54:57

What is "grub-bios" -- I can't find that in the package databases.
https://www.archlinux.org/packages/?q=grub-bios

You clearly are not following the Beginner's Guide.

The correct command to install GRUB to an MBR disk in a non-EFI system is:

# pacman -S grub
# grub-install --target=i386-pc --recheck /dev/sda

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Be … therboards

Also, your installation has no /etc/fstab -- you're supposed to do that from within the chroot as well...
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Be … e_an_fstab

MasterM1nd · 2014-12-27 13:57:35

I'm just mad

Do I need to do everything from start again? I can do everything just those base system {It took 1 hour last time }

Head_on_a_Stick · 2014-12-27 14:01:05

I would advise starting from scratch -- $DEITY only knows what mess you've made so far.

In fact, I would advise trying a different distribution -- Arch requires a lot of reading and learning; if you find this frustrating, it's clearly not suited to you.

MasterM1nd · 2014-12-27 14:03:49

It's not frustrating . I've tried many other linux distros too, You can read my this thread: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=191403

Well Is it mandatory to install those base system?

Head_on_a_Stick · 2014-12-27 14:15:57

Well, just try generating the fstab from within the chroot & re-installing GRUB using the correct commands & see if that works.

I'm done with this thread -- good luck!

MasterM1nd · 2014-12-27 14:30:10

ok.. I hope you know that I will regenerate the FSTAB and re-install the GRUB from again booting into ARCH using the USB key...

Lone_Wolf · 2014-12-27 14:35:49

$ pacman -Sii grub | grep grub-bios
Provides       : grub-common  grub-bios  grub-emu  grub-efi-x86_64
Conflicts With : grub-common  grub-bios  grub-emu  grub-efi-x86_64  grub-legacy
Replaces       : grub-common  grub-bios  grub-emu  grub-efi-x86_64
$

$ pacman -Ss grub-bios
core/grub 1:2.02.beta2-5
    GNU GRand Unified Bootloader (2)
$

grub-bios did exist at some point, but the way grub was build was changed and it disappeared.

MasterM1nd, you still appear to be using several different sources for installing, and some of them are out-of-date .

Please make sure you only use the beginner's guide and pages it links to from the archwiki.

If you found references to grub-bios in archwiki, then we have outdated pages and they need to be changed.

Trilby · 2014-12-27 14:40:59

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:

[archlinux is] clearly not suited to you.

Based on what we've seen in this thread, I have to agree. I also cannot help any further in this thread - I am completely lost, I have no idea what you have done nor what state you machine is in.

Being willing and able to google for options and try them out is generally a good skill for maintaining an archlinux install. But you don't yet know what you are doing, so you are googling likely for the wrong things, getting poor quality and out of date answers, then running random commands which are almost certainly compounding the initial problems further.

If you want to install arch, hold off on the googling. The beginner's guide really is a "paint by numbers" process. Just follow the directions step by step. As I said before, if you run into problems following the step-by-step guide, as us. But say what step you are on. We can help if you have only done what was in the guide up until that step. If you've been trying random crap from who-knows-where, then we can't help.

If you can't follow well written, thoroughly scrutinized, and revised step-by-step instructions, then I am sure you will never be happy with arch.

Arch Linux

#1 2014-12-26 14:23:36

error: no such device: GRUB problem

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