Bugzilla – Bug 106284
No GRUB menu after 1st reboot during installation
Last modified: 2005-12-01 17:39:09 UTC
I chose to install Beta2 on a spare hdd partition (/dev/hdb4, ext3). The machine was already dual-booting WinMe and SuSE 9.3 Pro. I installed a minimal system (text mode) and chose for GRUB to go to the MBR of the first hdd. When the installer prompted me to reboot I did, but after booting instead of showing me the boot loader I only got a prompt saying "GRUB: ". No further options. Booting into install CD 1 again I chose 'Reinstall bootloader', set it all up again (/dev/hda1: WinME, /dev/hdb1: SuSE 9.3, /dev/hdb4: SuSE 10.0 Beta 2) and rebooted once again -- same result.
Created attachment 47027 [details] content of /var/log/YaST2/ after reboot failed
Created attachment 47028 [details] hwinfo generated using Kanotix 2005-03 live CD
Perhaps I should add... One of the first actions that came to my mind was booting the rescue shell to try and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst manually, but the file was not present.
Hmm, I'm a bit confused. If there is no menu.lst file, then GRUB falls to the GRUB shell, which according to your report didn't happen. So this seems that this is a different fail. When you were in the rescue system, did you look for /boot/grub/menu.lst in the installed system? It is AFAIK mounted in /mnt directory. Torsten, any idea why GRUB doesn't report anything more useful? This sounds to me like 2nd stage wasn't loaded at all, but the GRUB instalation command was successful (see the attached log).
What exactly is on the screen when the boot process hangs? really " GRUB: " and nothing else ??? please provide a dump of the MBR and the generated /etc/grub.conf.
grub.conf is contained in the log (resp. output of GRUB processing it)
True. Nevertheless, the MBR of /dev/hda is probably where the problem lies; including a dump is necessary; mabe along with the BIOS geometry of /dev/hdb and an MBR dump of that, too.
Torsten: Sure if you can provide me with info on how to do that :) I'm fairly non-technical, so please be patient with me.
dd if=/dev/hda of=MBR.hda count=1 dd if=/dev/hdb of=MBR.hdb count=1 And then simply attach those files.
Created attachment 47270 [details] master boot record of /dev/hda
Created attachment 47271 [details] master boot record of /dev/hdb
The underlying problem should be fixed with grub-0.97-3