grub error 15 after hoary install

[gaffin]

Here's an update for anyone else who might have this problem.  Thanks to
those who offered advice.  



To recap: my hoary installation appeared to go fine until it was time
to "reboot and finish the installation".  My pc would not reboot, with
Grub returning an Error 15.



So, I:



1.  used tomsrtbt (http://www.toms.net/rb/download.html) boot disk to
boot my pc.



2. mounted my boot partition as follows:

$ mkdir /mnt/boot

$ mount /dev/hdc1 /mnt/boot        (your /boot partition may
vary, of course)



3. Then, I made a grub boot disk by inserting a blank floppy and
typing:

$ cd /mnt/boot/grub

$ dd if=stage1 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1

$ dd if=stage2 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 seek=1



4. Now, I can boot grub.  Which I did.



5. In Grub, I did the following:

grub> root (hd1,0)     # 'hd1' is the location of my /boot
partition.

grub> setup (hd0)      # this tells grub to install on my master
boot partition.



6.  That's it.  Reboot without a floppy in the floppy drive.





Afterword.  There is one more step I had to take to make this work, but
it might be unnecessary for most.  In the course of trying to
troubleshoot, I had changed my boot disk back and forth from NORMAL to
LBA.  It had settled on LBA.  Which Grub didn't like.  So, I switched
it to NORMAL in the BIOS setup and my installation is now completing as
I type this.



Also, the above steps are documented in more detail at:

http://www.linuxselfhelp.com/gnu/grub/html_chapter/grub_3.html





Hope this helps the next one to find this problem.  Thanks again for
the very helpful advice.



- david


-- 
gaffin