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eothred

Member

Registered: 2009-12-28

Posts: 25

GRUB not loading

I got a major problem after my latest restart. When trying to boot, my machine gets stuck with the text GRUB displaying in the top left corner on a black screen. This is before GRUB has started to load from what I can understand (which isn't all that much mind you, feel free to elaborate).

I have a Macbook Pro with a dual boot OSX/Arch Linux using rEFIt. Since I use the computer for work I am afraid I'm left with reinstalling Arch so I can get it up and running again, but I would love to get explained how I could understand why it got stuck, and more importantly, how I could have fixed this problem more easily? Please ask if I can provide more information!

.:B:.

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2006-11-26

Posts: 5,819

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Re: GRUB not loading

That past tense ('could have fixed') doesn't bode well, but I suppose, as with a regular GRUB setup, you should be able to boot off an install CD and fix things from there.

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eothred

Member

Registered: 2009-12-28

Posts: 25

Re: GRUB not loading

First off, thanks for very quick response!

Yes, I have a couple of hours to get it working, but I cannot leave it for days without fixing the problem.

I tried to understand what they were doing here: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=20800

This is what I did:
First I checked which partition was bootable with "fdisk -l". It was /dev/sda3.
Then I tried to do "install-grub /dev/sda3" as they explained in the linked forum. This did not seem to work from the output (that I didn't fully understand, but anyways), so I entered the "grub shell" or what you call it. From there I ran "setup (hd0)" and I got this info (slightly truncated):

/boot/grub/stage1 and stage2 exists,
e2fs_stage_1_5 exists
Running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0) failed
Running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0,2) failed
Running "install ...stage1 (hd0) ...stage2 p ...menu.lst" succeeded

When I now restarted the machine, GRUB managed to boot again (!), so I suppose I might have fixed something?

The big question though, what (might have) happened? This was a bit scary for a non-expert like me, that does not understand much about booting, runlevels and the like...

Edit: second question, is this a correct fix, or was it just a lucky shot that "by accident" worked temporarily?

Last edited by eothred (2011-01-14 08:50:58)