[jhwatts]

I am experiencing an install problem. The installation goes perfect with no error but as soon as I reboot the computer I get grub errors at the first start up. Can anybody tell me how to approach this problem.

[cncdreamer]

jhwatts:

Without more information, I have to assume this is a generic grub issue.

Have you read the grub documentation? I searched Google for "grub errors linux" and immediately found the grub troubleshooting pages:

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/man...eshooting.html

At a glance, this documentation can tell you much more than I can because grub always worked for me.

Good luck.

Regards,
Kent

[klick0]

I may be wrong on this, but depending on your system grub may have problems loading if you are using a large partition as to where it puts the boot files. Generally speaking you should of configured a /boot partition as the first primary partition around 128MB's.. I never do autopartition, if you used autopartition, it may have done this for you, if not I would definatly re-install and create a /boot partition as a first primary partition, and give it 128MB or greater.

If you've done this, or if the autopartitioner did, then I would refer you to the grub faq as in the previous post, as I am not a grub expert.

If you can't get grub to work, you may be able to use lilo, i've only done BDI install twice (on 2 different systems) some linux distro's allow you to select the bootloader. Lilo was the old standard and now grub is the new standard, but lilo works fine. I don't remember if the BDI allows the selection of Grub or not.

If you are running multiple drives on the system, make sure you are installing it on the correct drive as well. Perhaps you are planning to dual boot I dunno, that could entail a lot of different problems into the equation though. We'd need more info

good luck,
Ross

[jhwatts]

I am going to manually partition the hard drive. Can Klick0 suggest what sizes I will need to make the additional partitions? (exe. swap) I have never done it manually and I would like to know what I will need to allocate for the additional partitions. I am getting frustrated because my system is together and I can run all my motors using my computer with emc in my house. I have three older computers I am using in my shop so I swapping parts to try to get one of the three to run. What has got me baffled is the install completes without any errors but when I reboot I get grub prompt and that is it. I thought the computer would be the last thing to hold me up.

[klick0]

Based on the grub output it can tell you things like which stage of the bootloader that is getting hung at. If it doesn't even say "Stage 2" then it can't access the hard drive, which generally can be fixed with partitioning or some special commands in grub's setup.

As far as partitions, my emc box is setup like this (as I set almost all my boxes up like this)
/boot ext3 128M
swap 256M (this really doesn't matter, unless you have very little memory, and if you don't have enough ram to run emc, it's just not gonna work anyway)
/ ext3 check fill to end/max

Also, make sure you click force primary partition on ALL partitions.

Here is my sfdisk -d:
localhost:~# sfdisk -d /dev/hda
# partition table of /dev/hda
unit: sectors

/dev/hda1 : start= 63, size= 256977, Id=83, bootable
/dev/hda2 : start= 257040, size= 530145, Id=82
/dev/hda3 : start= 787185, size= 38282895, Id=83
/dev/hda4 : start= 0, size= 0, Id= 0
localhost:~#

your start and end numbers will vary with you hard drives block size, in my case they are 512bytes
/dev/hda1 is /boot
/dev/hda2 is SWAP
/dev/hda3 is / (root)

Basically the key to this is /boot being first, makes the bootloaders job easier..

Well that's what I do on all my linux comptuers and i've never had issues with grub, so I hope it works for you.

Ross

[cncdreamer]

Ross beat me to it! The most important issue is to be sure the /boot partition comes first because it is the only one that has to be read before Linux itself is running and thus the one most likely to give trouble if it is too big or starts too high in the cylinder list.

The size of the swap partition isn't so important, for the reasons Ross gave. Systems with a relatively large amount of RAM never swap in normal operation and can get by with no swap partition at all. I was taught long ago that the swap partition should be at least twice the size of physical RAM, and, on the BDI-4.30 install here at home, that seems to be what the autopartitioning got me (256MB RAM; apx 530MB swap space). Opinions differ on what the right size is, but as Ross said, if you're swapping, then your RAM is too small for EMC anyway.

In your first message you said you get grub errors but in your later message you say you get the grub prompt. Are you getting error messages and if so what are they?

Regards,
Kent

[jhwatts]

I have reserved manually 130 mb for the boot partition but still no luck. I have reset the bios pin on the motherboard to reset the entire mother board bios settings but what is strange no prompt occur during startup to allow me to make changes in the bios. I have even tried to install Windows XP on it and it gives me an error. I am thinking its some kind of major hardware error. I am sorry for my loose use of language it was a grub prompt not an grub error.

[cncdreamer]

I've run out of suggestions. I hope it doesn't take too long to diagnose and fix (or replace as the case may be).

Regards,
Kent

[klick0]

It sounds to me as if your hard drive is not in the boot order inside your bios. Your cd-rom is though which is what you use to bootup and run the installer. The installer of any OS is not going to care if your bios's boot order is includes the hard drive you are installing too. I would go into your bios and verify your hard drive is second in the boot order. Clearly your cd-rom is first, and if you have a floppy drive throw it away.

Every bios says something different but i'm assuming the error you are getting is non-bootable disk, press any key to try again... something like that, maybe.

Ross

[mdynac]

which emc version are you trying to install?

is it a BDI? if so which one?