Double checking grub-install -- revisited ??

William Case billlinux at rogers.com
Wed Jul 2 17:56:20 UTC 2008


On Wed, 2008-07-02 at 19:35 +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:50:31 -0400, William Case wrote:
> 
> > I checked and low and behold I found GRUB listed in the first block
> > (mbr ??) of both disks.  So I thought I should chase that down before I
> > filed an inappropriate bug report.
> 
> Then what happens if you overwrite sda's mbr with NTLDR?
> 
> To me it is still not clear what your boot sequence looks like.
> 
> You say this is a dual-boot machine. Unless you prefer ntldr, you
> would store grub in sda. However, you say you store it in sdb.
> So, how exactly do you boot? Do you really chainload sdb from sda?
> 
Sorry Michael, I was trying to avoid re-telling a long tale of woe.

Here it is;

About four weeks ago my commercial boot loader (BootMagic) was blown
away by the WindowsXP sp3 download and install.  Fine and good: that
didn't surprise me -- it was an old version of BootMagic kept out of
stubbornness.  I had paid for it before I started using Linux so I was
going to use it.

I had climbed the grub learning curve a couple of years ago, so I am
fairly confident about using the grub shell or grub-install.

When BootMagic was blown away, I just installed grub.  During a first
attempt at a grub install I had an ooops! So I just re-installed grub
and everything seemed fine.  The intent was to install grub on /dev/sda
dual booting to sdb /boot. (BIOS loads in the natural hd0, hd1 order.)

Because it was an oops (typo) and not a confusion, I didn't pay
attention to the mistake, so now a month later I have forgotten exactly
what I did wrong.  Besides I thought I had recovered.

About a week ago (I don't re-boot very often), I noticed the Fedora
grub splash screen appear for 1/2 second or less, then go blank and
pause for a second or two.  Then a new splash screen appeared and
everything progressed fine from there.  This occurs definitely during
the grub stage of bootup. 

I didn't do anything then because I was going to fresh install Fedora 9
with a new grub.  Which I have done.  But the double splash screen still
appears.

To add to the confusion, I installed a new motherboard with a new and
different video chip three months ago.  Since I don't boot often, I
could have not noticed the double splashimage for some time.  This would
support the changing video mode suggestion.

-- 
Regards Bill;
Fedora 9, Gnome 2.22.2
Evo.2.22.2, Emacs 22.2.1




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