Re: [K12OSN] CRC error on booting

[Ken Barber <mountainman peak org>]

On Monday 05 January 2004 07:10, Doug Simpson wrote:

[snippage]

> Installed again from the CD-ROM, and let it make the boot
> floppy. The system boots fine with the floppy. It just won't
> boot from the hard drive. It also runs fine once booted with no
> errors.
>
> When booting from the hard drive:
>
> It goes to loading vmlinuz . . . . .
>
> CRC error
>
> System Halted.
>
> What now?

Well, you've just made a major step forward:  you've found a way
that DOESN'T fail.

I think you've pretty much ruled out the CD-ROM drive, and I
 think we can all quit barking up that tree.

Since the only thing that a floppy-boot provides is a bootloader
(and possibly the physical location of the kernel on the hard
drive) it appears to me that there is a strong finger of
suspicion pointing at the first 511 bytes on your hard drive (the
area before the partition table that 'doze calls the "master boot
record").

Were I in your shoes, my next troubleshooting step would be to
zero-fill that area (dd works splendidly for this) and try
re-installing the bootloader.  I've had bad things happen in this
area before, and zero-filling it usually solved the problem (and
when it didn't I usually had to discard that hard drive).

I think I remember your name being an old-timer on this and other
lists, so I won't deign to tell you how to do this; I suspect you
already know.

Ken