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

[Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com>]

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On Saturday 05 July 2008, Mick wrote:
> 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.

Just in case, you may want to try this:

# grub  <--Also use --no-floppy if it hangs probing a floppy drive that 
doesn't exist-->
grub> root (hd2,0)  <--If your /boot drive is e.g. in /dev/hdd1)-->
grub> setup (hd0)  <--This will re-install GRUB in the MBR of /dev/hda-->
grub> quit

If this does not help then I am not sure what else might fix it.
-- 
Regards,
Mick

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