Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 215270
Grub fails to boot after fresh install
Last modified: 2008-05-06 12:48:10 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Opera/9.02 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Description of problem: I installed FC6 and grub failed to boot with a message "GRUB hard disk error". I tried both, 32 and 64-bit versions with the same outcome. The hardware is the following: DFI Lan Party Ultra-D NForce4 2GB dual/channel OCZ memory two Raptor hard disks (WD740GD SATA) two IDE hard disks AMD Athlon 64 4400+ X2 The operating system is installed on one of the two SATA disks. The other SATA disk and the two IDE disks serve as storage. Here's parted printout (from FC5, which is also installed and works perfectly): Disk /dev/sda: 74.4GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 32.3kB 26.2GB 26.2GB primary ntfs boot 2 26.2GB 74.3GB 48.1GB extended lba 5 26.2GB 26.3GB 107MB logical ext3 6 26.3GB 39.7GB 13.4GB logical ext3 7 39.7GB 39.9GB 107MB logical ext3 8 39.9GB 53.3GB 13.4GB logical ext3 9 53.3GB 73.7GB 20.4GB logical ext3 10 73.7GB 74.3GB 650MB logical linux-swap 11 74.3GB 74.3GB 16.4MB logical fat16 hidden sda1 is an NTFS partition with Windows installed (for Pro Evolution Soccer and other games;-) ). sda5 and sda6 are the boot and the root partition for Fedora 5. sda7 and sda8 are the boot and the root partition for Fedora 6. sda9 is the home partition. The last partition is an Acronis OS Selector partition. OS Selector boots everything else. I use OS Selector, since I can't rely on Windows stability and, if it needs to be reinstalled, it overwrites the MBR. This way it is not a problem, since I can restore the OS Selector from Windows. I have to have Windows for games. I have been doing this for many years and never had any problems. I always have two sets of boot/root partitions, one for primary use and the other for testing Fedora releases and sometimes for checking out other distributions. If everything is OK with the new Fedora installation, they switch roles, i.e. the test partitions become primary and the primary ones become test partitions. If everything was fine with the new FC6 installation, that would have happened. Luckily, I do this, and I am not completely screwed by FC6 not booting. If I add en entry in the FC5 grub.conf (sda5 boot partition) for booting FC6 (copy the stuff from grub.conf from sda7, FC6 boot partition) I can boot Fedora 6. So, obviously the problem is in grub that comes with FC6. What is the problem? How do I solve this problem? Will grub be fixed and an updated image released? I can't imagine that I am the only one with this problem. I see people are compalining at fedoraforum.org. Will I be able to, at least, do a network install, which would pull an updated version of grub with this problem fixed or will I have to skip this version of Fedora and wait for Fedora 7? Please, fix this before Fedora 7 is released. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): grub-0.97-13 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install Fedora 6 2. Try to boot 3. Get the message: GRUB hard disk error Actual Results: Got the message: GRUB hard disk error Expected Results: Fedora should have booted. Additional info:
*** Bug 215271 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I had a similar problem after a fresh install: Grub froze when loading stage2. Booting using the FC6 rescue CD, downloading and reverting to the grub-0.97-5 RPM from FC5, running grub-install, and rebooting fixed the problem for me.
An update from the above comment: After the first boot, I re-upgraded to grub-0.97-13 and it seems to work fine now, in contrast to before. Booting the first time with grub-0.97-5 seemed to solve the problem.
Fedora apologizes that these issues have not been resolved yet. We're sorry it's taken so long for your bug to be properly triaged and acted on. We appreciate the time you took to report this issue and want to make sure no important bugs slip through the cracks. If you're currently running a version of Fedora Core between 1 and 6, please note that Fedora no longer maintains these releases. We strongly encourage you to upgrade to a current Fedora release. In order to refocus our efforts as a project we are flagging all of the open bugs for releases which are no longer maintained and closing them. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/LifeCycle/EOL If this bug is still open against Fedora Core 1 through 6, thirty days from now, it will be closed 'WONTFIX'. If you can reporduce this bug in the latest Fedora version, please change to the respective version. If you are unable to do this, please add a comment to this bug requesting the change. Thanks for your help, and we apologize again that we haven't handled these issues to this point. The process we are following is outlined here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/F9CleanUp We will be following the process here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping to ensure this doesn't happen again. And if you'd like to join the bug triage team to help make things better, check out http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers
This bug is open for a Fedora version that is no longer maintained and will not be fixed by Fedora. Therefore we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of Fedora please feel free to reopen thus bug against that version. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.