Disk Boot Failure [solved]

timm · 2005-04-30 20:54:15

I'm installing arch on a rebuilt system, but I cannot get it to boot. I have pared the system down to a a SCSI card, a video card, a single hard drive, an IDE CD, a SCSI tape drive, and a floppy. I have tried my standard installation partitioning scheme, and the automatic version.

No matter what I do, while the system seems to install correctly, when I reboot I get a Disk Boot Failure.

I've zeroed the drive, I've tried an fdisk /mbr, I've run a Maxtor burn-in test which came back fine. I'm convinced it isn't the drive. The standard menu.lst uses root (0,0) and the kernel in /dev/discs/disc0/part3 after an automatic installation. I mounted the /boot partition set up by the auto install, and the grub directory and files are there.

What am I missing?

Last edited by timm (2009-05-04 22:11:42)

phrakture · 2005-04-30 21:07:04

what gives you the "Disk Boot Failure" - it doesn't sound like a grub message... it sounds like a BIOS message - maybe your bios doesn't like having grub on the mbr? try installing grub to your /boot partition

timm · 2005-05-01 00:10:20

Tried that; no luck; tried updating bios and doing it both ways, no luck there either.

The weird part is that the arch installer acts like it is doing fine. MaxBlast says the drive is fine. However I tried a grub image floppy and once it came up, it couldn't find the hard drive.

T-Dawg · 2005-05-01 00:25:45

Another thing you may want to consider is disabling boot sector virus in your bios.
Theoretically when this option is enabled, it will stop any attempt to modify the mbr (by grub in your case), but I've never tried it...

phrakture · 2005-05-01 00:58:12

Penguin wrote:

Another thing you may want to consider is disabling boot sector virus in your bios.
Theoretically when this option is enabled, it will stop any attempt to modify the mbr (by grub in your case), but I've never tried it...

ahhh.. yeah i'll second that - most bootloaders have problems with bios "virus protection"

timm · 2005-05-01 15:54:01

Checked that; virus protection is disabled in the bios.

Kern · 2005-05-01 16:33:37

whats the hard drive ? SCSI or IDE, and does the bootup sequence in BIOS match where the OS is installed.

recall when i installed Slackware yrs ago, that SCSI fouled anything i did.
My setup was SCSI card & CD with IDE h/d .
To install i had to boot from SCSI (in BIOS) , not the CD directly, and the card HAD to be the bootable type.

Once installed, (ide kernel) it wouldnt find the CD drive. installing scsi kernel ended in failure.

wonder if u have the same prob but in reverse.
if your h/d is IDE maybe try removing the scsi stuff and installing just IDE initially ?

timm · 2005-05-01 21:08:20

I think it's solved.

Everybody who was mentioning the BIOS got me looking in there, but I found nothing out of the ordinary. I decided to try to install Windows 2K to see if that would boot, which it did flawlessly. I reinstalled arch, and go the disk failure. Back to the BIOS.

This is an IDE hard drive; the only thing SCSI is the tape drive.

What I found was that the access on the hard drive was set to Auto, which I had seen before but didn't think to be a problem. I tried changing that to LBA (which is what I thought Auto would do on a drive like this), and suddenly arch comes up just fine.

I have a couple of RocketRaid cards that I'm installing, and will be playing around with the SCSI as well. I'm going to play with things a bit more, but unless I can make it fail with some other tweaking, that BIOS setting appears to have been the problem.

Thanks to everyone for their help!

Kern · 2005-05-02 00:37:39

well done dude.

obviously took some perseverence to sort it, but glad u got it worked out

nice one

Arch Linux

#1 2005-04-30 20:54:15

Disk Boot Failure [solved]

#2 2005-04-30 21:07:04

Re: Disk Boot Failure [solved]

#3 2005-05-01 00:10:20

Re: Disk Boot Failure [solved]

#4 2005-05-01 00:25:45

Re: Disk Boot Failure [solved]

#5 2005-05-01 00:58:12

Re: Disk Boot Failure [solved]

#6 2005-05-01 15:54:01

Re: Disk Boot Failure [solved]

#7 2005-05-01 16:33:37

Re: Disk Boot Failure [solved]

#8 2005-05-01 21:08:20

Re: Disk Boot Failure [solved]

#9 2005-05-02 00:37:39

Re: Disk Boot Failure [solved]

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