robertjlee
June 29th, 2008, 01:28 AM
I am having booting problems. When I boot, I get the normal BIOS messages, then text-mode with a flashing cursor in the top-left corner. No GRUB menu appears.
My new Ori-series desktop (http://efficientpc.co.uk/desktops/ori/) came pre-loaded with Ubuntu 8.04.
As shipped, I had problems booting with my PS/2 mouse plugged in. But after unplugging it, everything worked and the system would boot straight in every time. The seller (Efficient PC, a Canonical approved vendor) only used the first hard disk and didn't set up software RAID or encryption, so I chose to re-install.
I installed from the Alternate CD, and set up a RAID-1 (mirrored) array for the /boot partition (at the start of each disk), and RAID-5 for an encrypted / partition (I forgot to include swap). This eventually installed, but the process proved to be a rather buggy one (ie if I made one mistake I had to reboot and start again).
Having finally got the OS set up, I found I could only get the system to boot by booting from the install CD and selecting "boot from first hard disk". I tried installing grub onto the MBR of (hd0), and it made no difference; I could boot fine through the CD but not directly from the hard disk.
As an experiment, I ran
apt-get install mbr and used that to install a new MBR boot-loader to chain the grub boot-loader installed on (hd0,0). This made no difference when telling the BIOS to boot from the hard disk. When booting from the CD, and chaining via the "boot from first hard disk" option, I got the boot-loader prompt asking me which partition to boot from; A selected advanced mode but no other keys (1 or Enter) had any visible effect (even though the grub boot-loader seemed to be installed on (hd0,0) successfully).
My attempts to re-install grub on (hd0) fail with warnings about ext3_stage1_5 not being found when I run setup from the grub prompt, and give a "not found" error when trying to select any option. So I guess I'm looking at yet another reinstall just to fix the MBR, but I doubt that will avoid the need to boot from a CD.
If it wasn't for the fact that this is a brand-new machine that booted straight into Hardy when I first got it, I'd say this was a straight-forward BIOS problem.
Does anyone know how I can diagnose this problem?
Edit: Forgot to say that, to make it boot from an encrypted RAID disk, I had to fix the crypttab (http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/RAIDvsCrypto), but I don't think it's even getting that far.
My new Ori-series desktop (http://efficientpc.co.uk/desktops/ori/) came pre-loaded with Ubuntu 8.04.
As shipped, I had problems booting with my PS/2 mouse plugged in. But after unplugging it, everything worked and the system would boot straight in every time. The seller (Efficient PC, a Canonical approved vendor) only used the first hard disk and didn't set up software RAID or encryption, so I chose to re-install.
I installed from the Alternate CD, and set up a RAID-1 (mirrored) array for the /boot partition (at the start of each disk), and RAID-5 for an encrypted / partition (I forgot to include swap). This eventually installed, but the process proved to be a rather buggy one (ie if I made one mistake I had to reboot and start again).
Having finally got the OS set up, I found I could only get the system to boot by booting from the install CD and selecting "boot from first hard disk". I tried installing grub onto the MBR of (hd0), and it made no difference; I could boot fine through the CD but not directly from the hard disk.
As an experiment, I ran
apt-get install mbr and used that to install a new MBR boot-loader to chain the grub boot-loader installed on (hd0,0). This made no difference when telling the BIOS to boot from the hard disk. When booting from the CD, and chaining via the "boot from first hard disk" option, I got the boot-loader prompt asking me which partition to boot from; A selected advanced mode but no other keys (1 or Enter) had any visible effect (even though the grub boot-loader seemed to be installed on (hd0,0) successfully).
My attempts to re-install grub on (hd0) fail with warnings about ext3_stage1_5 not being found when I run setup from the grub prompt, and give a "not found" error when trying to select any option. So I guess I'm looking at yet another reinstall just to fix the MBR, but I doubt that will avoid the need to boot from a CD.
If it wasn't for the fact that this is a brand-new machine that booted straight into Hardy when I first got it, I'd say this was a straight-forward BIOS problem.
Does anyone know how I can diagnose this problem?
Edit: Forgot to say that, to make it boot from an encrypted RAID disk, I had to fix the crypttab (http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/RAIDvsCrypto), but I don't think it's even getting that far.