Re: [Hampshire] Grub / boot issue

The easiest way to deal with the problem is to create a small partition on the
drive which will fit s small linux distro. Install into this partition. When
the small distro is running update grub.

Latest Puppy should do it.

This will give you the details about the drives that you will need.

You then should be able to access the other linux.

Once the other linux is running you can remove the puppy linux.

This has saved me in the past.


On Tuesday 28 September 2010 10:15:38 Paul Tansom wrote:
> I must be missing something obvious on this, but I've done it before
> without problems and, although I've got a bit more investigating up my
> sleeve, this one is getting annoying!
>
> I've got a system (Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server) that is running quite happily on
> a software RAID mirror. One drive needs swapping, which I have just done
> without problems until I want to swap and replace the second one as well.
> Before I removed the failing drive I checked that I had grub installed in
> the boot sector of both drives and that I could boot off the good drive
> without the failing one connected - no problems whether connected to SATA1
> or SATA2 on the motherboard.
>
> I installed the second drive, matched up the partition sizes, rebooted and
> resync'd the partitions. All is working fine - except...
>
> If I remove the original drive to boot purely from the new one (as I did
> initially for the first swap out) I cannot boot. Grub has been installed in
> the boot sector, but somewhere there must be a direct reference to the
> original drive with some form of identification. I just can't think what!
>
> If the drive is connected to SATA1 the boot hangs after the grub menu with:
>
> Loading please wait...
>
> at the top of the screen, and at the bottom:
>
> Kernel alive
> kernel direct mapping tables up to 100000000 @ 8000-d000
>
> Which is exactly what you see during a successful boot.
>
> If the drive is connected to SATA2 the boot fails with
>
> GRUB Hard Disk Error
>
> Clearly it is looking for something that has to be on SATA1 and seems to
> want the original drive. Oddly the original drive still boots on either
> SATA1 or SATA2 without problems. The entire disk is sync'd with the RAID
> mirror so the drive contents are the same, and grub has been installed in
> the same way to both drives. Both drives are of the same capacity (500G
> and amazingly the capacity matches exactly, not just in marketing termes),
> although the original is Samsung and the new one is WD.
>
> Anyone have any ideas? I'm about to double check the location of
> /boot/grub/stage1 at the grub boot stage in case that is different. There's
> half a temptation to install 3 drives at the same time to sync up the new
> drive, but I'm not happy to do that until I can boot cleanly of the new
> drive on its own.
>
> This is annoying as I've done the same process before (admittedly on PATA
> not SATA) and even done it to higher capaicty drives and then grown the
> partitions to use the extra space.