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ould

Member

Registered: 2007-05-22

Posts: 124

Intermittent GRUB boot issues

Hi Everyone,

I recently shuffled some of my PC equipment around the house and ended up with a different motherboard on my main PC. This PC currently has 5 SATA drives attached to it plus one IDE DVDRW drive. I had the same drive configuration hooked up to the old motherboard with no issues. Now, however, I seem to have an issue with GRUB after I have connected a flash drive, even if I disconnect it before I reboot GRUB still seems to throw out on "ERROR 17". The only way to alleviate the issue is to disconnect all the SATA drives and reboot with just my main drive connected(which is connected to SATA port #1), I can then power down and reconnect the other SATA drives and all is well again until I decide to plug in a flash drive(or any drive for that matter). I then have the same issue all over again. It's a rather "old" motherboard(an ABIT KN9-SLI from '06 or '07) and I seem to have the latest BIOS already installed. Any ideas? Would LILO work better than GRUB in this instance(I have never used LILO so don't know much about it)? I also thought of trying the latest GRUB2 but figure it will probably work pretty much the same as GRUB. It's a rather annoying problem to say the least, luckily I don't reboot the machine too often as it acts as my file server as well.

Thanks,

Kevin

pyther

Member

Registered: 2008-01-21

Posts: 1,395

Website

Re: Intermittent GRUB boot issues

It sounds as if the bios boot order is being goofed up. Is there any possibility that one of the other drives might also have a grub install on it? I would make sure that your hard drives are suppose boot before usb devices.

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ould

Member

Registered: 2007-05-22

Posts: 124

Re: Intermittent GRUB boot issues

Yeah I figured it was something to do with the bios but it puzzles me that I get the grub error even if I unplug the USB stick prior to rebooting.

But now that you mention it I did temporarily have a 6th hard drive connected to transfer some files and such and it *may* have had grub installed on it at some point, you may have hit the nail on the head, I will do a couple more reboots under different circumstances and see what happens. I didn't even think of possibly having grub on another drive. Good call.

Will update after some more testing.

Thanks,

Kevin