GRUB Hard Disk Error

[traxy 0]

Hello!

 

First off - yes, I'm a newbie. Yes, I've googled myself silly to find something that would work. Yes, I've contacted the resident Linux person among my friends and asked for help. He had a bunch of suggestions, none solved the it. Problem remains.

 

I have a Toshiba Libretto U100 notebook, tiny little thing, running on Intel® 855 chipset motherboard. IDE harddrive (as far as I'm aware). As I don't use it for a lot of things, I thought it would be excellent for me to install Linux on it and get used to it.

 

I installed SuSE 10 on it. It went fine, no problem with the install disc or anything, and I wiped the HDD clean of any partitions to start anew. In the end of the installation, it reboots to load Linux... and it just says GRUB Hard Disk Error, white on black. Nothing else.

 

So I tried a few other distros: Ubuntu 5, Kubuntu 6 and Mandriva 2006. The only one I got working was Mandriva, the other two had the exact same error as SuSE did.

 

Have tried booting off a live CD and used the terminal/console thing to troubleshoot, but alas, no. It seems the HDD is recognised in the system as /dev/hda1.

 

Some commands tried and the results:

 

root (hd0,6) : Error 21 "Selected disk does not exist". I've tried both hd1 and hd0 as well as hda1. I've also tried replacing the 6 for any number between 0 and 7.

root (hda1,6) : Error 23 "Error while parsing number"

find /boot/grub/stage1 : "no such file or directory" in normal console, error 15 File Not Found if the console was set to GRUB

mkdir kubuntu (was trying this in Kubuntu) then mount /dev/hda kubuntu and chroot ubuntu - now here's where it stopped working, because it would not use grub-install /dev/hda. It just gave me general help options when typing anything after grub-install.

Basically, everything listed in this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=24113 plus also using sudo before the commands whenever it said access denied.

 

Also tried repairing the SuSE installation, trying to get it to use another boot loader, but that didn't work either. Although I might've done it wrong, so I'll try again.

 

http://www.suselinuxsupport.de/wikka.php?wakka=Gruberrors said this about error 21 "This error is returned if the device part of a device- or full file name refers to a disk or BIOS device that is not present or not recognized by the BIOS in the system". Yeah, a Toshiba BIOS doesn't exactly sport a lot of options...

 

Just one HDD, one unpartitioned space that any Linux distro has been free to put into its three little partitions, no Windows on it to look out for whatsoever. Sure, I could just give up and install Mandriva, as that worked fine (is it using LILO as default???), but I like SuSE, it's nice and simple for a n00b like me, and since I managed to finally get my desktop's Linux to play MP3s (not quite sure how), I would like to stick with it. It shouldn't be a compatibility problem, right? I should be able to get it working, if I can just get the GRUB thing to agree with the laptop.

 

PLEASE HELP!

[traxy 0]

Tried installing SuSE again a few times... still got the same error, even though I specified to use LILO as boot loader in the expert setup. Now, however, I selected the advanced repair option, and finally got it booting up. Yay! Now I just need to convince it to play MP3s and use a wireless network card.

[danleff 0]

First of all, let me ask, is this SuSE install verion 10 or 10.1? Yes, this can make a difference.

 

With Linux the devil is in the details. Laptops can give one headaches, due to how power management is handled and general hardware issues.

 

Let's look at the grub issues first. It appears that you probably did not erase your partitions on the hard drive completely. Why? We will see. Your detailed post deserves a good answer.

 

Quote:

root (hd0,6) : Error 21 "Selected disk does not exist". I've tried both hd1 and hd0 as well as hda1. I've also tried replacing the 6 for any number between 0 and 7.

root (hda1,6) : Error 23 "Error while parsing number"

 

You were mixing up the general designation of hard drive partitions in Linux and how grub sees things.

 

1. hd0,6 is the 7th partition on the hard drive, Grub starts with zero, so, 6 is really the 7th partition. I would assume that you had an extended partition still active and with your multiple installation attempts, you had multiple logical partitions on an extended partition. Grub was looking for the 7th partition, which may have been wrong anyway. In short, it was confused given the complexity of the hard drive partitons and probable mess from all the installation attempts.

 

If you had really wiped the entire hard drive, then SuSE should have been on (hd0,0), or the first partition on a primary master hard drive, where hd0 is the primary master and the second 0 would be the first partition on the hard drive.

 

hda is the general Linux designation for the primary master hard drive, not the first partition, which is hda1. The general designation starts with 1 for the first partition.

 

Quote:

mkdir kubuntu (was trying this in Kubuntu) then mount /dev/hda kubuntu and chroot ubuntu - now here's where it stopped working, because it would not use grub-install /dev/hda. It just gave me general help options when typing anything after grub-install.

 

These directions that you followed did not explain the process fully. This is the problem when giving directions. Not explaining enough leads to errors, assuming folks know what you are talking about. Unfortunately, Linux gurus assume this a lot. I do it myself at times.

 

In order to chroot into an installation, you designate the actual partition, not the entire hard drive. hda is the entire hard drive, where hda1 would designate a partition. So,

 

mount /dev/hda kubuntu should have been mount /dev/hda1 kubuntu, where the number designates the actual partition. You tried to chroot into the entire hard drive, rather than the partition. Your actual Ubuntu installation was not mounted, so all the rescue tools were not available to you. Once you chroot, you need to navigate to the place where you mounted the installation, whch would be cd ubuntu.

 

MP3 files have copyright issues, so MP3 player codecs are not available in a default installation of SuSE.

 

See this article and this one to give you some hints and ideas what you need to do.

 

This is assuming SuSE 10, not 10.1.

 

Once you digest all this, then we can move on to the wireless. Assuming that the wireless that you have is the default card on the machine, then you probably have the Atheros chipset on the wireless card. You can get this to work in SuSE, by installing a driver package, such as MadWifi. More on this later.