Re: [K12OSN] CRC error on booting

[Steve Wright <paua quicksilver net nz>]

On Tue, 2004-01-06 at 08:48, Ken Barber wrote:
> > 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.  [....]
> 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 agree.  I bet the installer is placing the boot block in the
partition, not on the MBR.

I imagine that there is a boot block installed on the MBR that is from
an old install.  This MBR block is currently booting, and failing on
your system.

I expect your recent installs have been installing the boot instructions
in the partition /dev/hda1 itself, rather than the MBR on /dev/hda.

If this is true, then your system will skip the boot instructions in
/boot and proceed with the *old* (bogus) instructions in the MBR,
subsequently failing when it tries to load a non-existant kernel.


Logically, you *should* be able to repair this problem by booting your
system from floppy, and forcing grub to rewrite the boot block, but to
the MBR.

First, study `info grub` and `info grub-install` to see what your
options are.  My cursory glance indicates ;


# grub-install /dev/hda



best,
Steve