Re: [gentoo-user] Grub on a new disk

[Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com>]

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On Saturday 05 July 2008, Florian Philipp wrote:
> On Sat, 5 Jul 2008 15:06:31 +0100

> Then I've installed grub into hda's MBR. Then something odd happened:
> Stage1.5 loads quiet fast but then Grub hangs once again of ~20sec
> with: "Grub loading, please wait ..."
>
> Since that is the moment when Grub accesses /dev/hdd for the first
> time, I think it could really be a problem with the hard disk, however,
> one that doesn't affect anything else. Maybe an automatic SMART
> self-test at boot-up? I'll investigate and as a workaround I'll get an
> SD-card or cheap USB-stick for Grub, since - unfortunately - the kernel
> is too big to fit on a floppy.

I know what I would have done - right from the start.  Not used grub-install.  
Not installed it in every single disk.  Not installed it in any partition, 
unless I intended to chainload separately the GRUB bootloader of the said 
partition.  Now, I know that this doesn't help and won't resolve your issue, 
but perhaps next time . . .

I am not sure how GRUB goes about probing and reading boot sectors at boot 
time.  As I understand it at the time it is installed in an MBR, the position 
of the grub fs is also written in there right after the boot code.  At boot 
time the boot code (stage1) jumps to the block device where grub's root fs is 
stored to read and execute stage1.5 which can read the /boot device fs and 
then read the stage2 files, which finally go and load the main OS kernel 
image.  Assuming this is correct, then what you have installed in the MBR of 
hdb and hdd and the partition boot sector of hdd1 is irrelevant and it 
*should not* make grub take so long.

That's the reason why I said something hardware-wise may be amiss, although I 
can see that your checks and reasoning are sound.
-- 
Regards,
Mick

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