Will not boot from HD

Jan Kokoska kokoskaj at seznam.cz
Fri Oct 8 13:22:37 UTC 2004


If it freezes before entring stage 2 (i.e. >during< FS specific stage
1.5) that means it cannot read the filesystem.

Do you see some grub ERROR: # or does it just freeze?

Enter grub command line from its menu, set up root like your first
ubuntu does, e.g "root (hd0.0)" and while looking for kernel, use
tabbing completion, as in "kernel /boot/<tab>" and see if grub can read
it.. I have seen a case where it could list the / dir, but not /boot. FS
was damaged and it turned out the inode containing / was fine and some
other were not. GRUB's ext2/3 support is definitely more fragile than
kernel's.

Which reminds me, do you use ext2/3 partition to boot from?

If in doubt about the disk, boot your Knoppix and run "smartctl -
a /dev/hda". You preferably don't want to see nay entries in error log
and too many (or any at all) reallocated sectors. Severity of the
problem varies, depending on the word count in the output for "critial",
"fatal" etc. ;) Lots of log entries are in fact harmless, examine
closely.

Regards

Jan




On Fri, 2004-10-08 at 08:54 -0400, wrote:
> Harware is as follows:
> AMD XP1700
> GE Force MMX400
> 512 mb RAM
> 80 GB harddrive
> 
> I am not sitting in front of the PC at the moment, but if memory serves, the lasr message was the loading of grub 1.5. I used the same ISO to install ubuntu on my laptop with no issues. I re-burned the image to a new disk with the same result. I am able to load KNOPPIX from CD, but I guess that does not rulle out a HD issue. I would like to verify that that is the case before buying a new one.
> 
> Thank You for the input.
> Steve
> > 
> > From: Jan Kokoska <kokoskaj at seznam.cz>
> > Date: 2004/10/08 Fri AM 08:04:41 EDT
> > To: ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com,  tste3576 at bellsouth.net
> > Subject: Re: Will not boot from HD
> > 
> > On Fri, 2004-10-08 at 07:35 -0400, wrote:
> > > 4. The system initiates the grub process.
> > > 5. The screen goes blank and stops.
> > 
> > What is the last message you see? What stage (as in 1, 1.5, 2) does it
> > freeze in?
> > 
> > Make sure you have the latest Ubuntu iso build and tell us your hw
> > configuration, this looks like hardware issue.
> > 
> > Regards
> > 
> > Jan
> > 
> > 
> 
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