grub error 15 after hoary install

[David McGaffin]

On Mon, 2005-04-11 at 18:55 -0400, skoal wrote:
> The only thing I would suggest is:
> 
> 1. use a grub boot disk.  Maybe you could make one with your good
> laptop grub installation.
> 2. If you don't know how to make one, does the Ubuntu install CD come
> with a recovery mode?  I don't know.  
> 3. If not, if you have access to another good linux drive, boot from
> that one and follow/modify the instructions I gave above for the other
> drive (which would be the slave, hdb).
> 

Thanks for these suggestions.  I had just a little time last night to
play with this.  Booting with tomsrtbt, I was able to edit the grub
configuration.  I was trying to turn on debug mode or verbose mode, but
I didn't see any additional information besides the same error message.

I'll try your suggestions tonight.  Frankly, if the grub boot disk
works, I would almost be content, since I almost never reboot this
computer.  I'll let you know if I have any luck.

- david


> If you made a /boot partition as your first partition, you would -not-
> need to prepend a /boot to /vmlinuz.  It's been awhile since I've
> installed ubuntu and am doing this from memory, but I don't believe you
> need to edit anything in your 'menu.lst'.  I may be wrong.
> 
> WRT Error 15:
> I think you have several issues going on here.  One, if you installed
> grub to the MBR of hda (for example), then it sets up pointers to find
> the 'stage' files in the partition where your /boot partition is (hda1
> in your case).  That should at least get you a grub menu (when you hit
> ESC), whether or not your 'menu.lst' can be found (I believe).  The
> error 15 should only occur -after- grub tries to run a menu entry.
> 
> I have heard of some funkiness with changing from lilo to grub, or vice
> versa.  I can't remember which direction that is.  I apologize but I'm
> doing this all from memory and the drive I was using ubuntu on went up
> in smoke a while back.  I'll see what else I can find in the meantime.
> 
> Here's my partition information on -another- distro which might provide
> some insight.  The syntax would be slightly different running Ubuntu of
> course:
> > 
> > [skoal at morpheus ~]$ cat /proc/partitions 
> > major minor  #blocks  name
> > 
> > 3     0    2564790 hda
> > 3     1      62338 hda1
> > 3     2     249952 hda2
> > 3     3    2252407 hda3
> 
> and the relevant 'menu.lst'
> 
> > root   (hd0,0)
> > kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/discs/disc0/part3 ro
> 
> That's a simple /boot (hda1), swap (hda2), and / (hda3) partition
> scheme.  My 'menu.lst' root points to the /boot partition on hda
> (hd0,0).  The kernel line says find the kernel in the root (/vmlinuz26)
> of that partition and mount the root filesystem on hda3 (part3).
> 
> 
> -- 
> skoal
>