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Disk Boot Failure After Successful Install
http://forums.linhes.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6884		 Page 1 of 1
Author:  BSquared [ Fri Nov 11, 2005 11:01 am ]
Post subject:  Disk Boot Failure After Successful Install
First of all, forgive me if this post is redundant, but I didn't see anything that matched my problem exactly.

I have a SATA hard drive in a home built machine that I tried to install R5A22. I performed the manual installation as instructed and was able to partition the HDD and perform the install (though there were some "file Not Found messages that flashed up towards the end of the install, but it comes back as Install Complete). When rebooting, I get a "Booting from CD/DVD" message and it either hangs there if the HDD is connected to the SATA II port or I get a "disk boot failure - Insert system disk" message if connected to the SATA I port. This occurs independant of which boot device is set in the BIOS. I should also note that my BIOS only has Enable/Disable settings for the SATA drives - no legacy settings seem to exist.

I have verified that the KnoppMyth files have in fact been installed on the HDD and whent so far as to install a basic Debian system with the same result.

Is this a hardware problem (something related to the SATA drive) or something else? Any thoughts on this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Some system specifics:
Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra (nVidia nForce Ultra)
AMD Athlon 64 3000+
300GB Seagate Barracude SATA HDD
eVGA GeForece 6600 Video Card
Author:  mad_paddler [ Fri Nov 11, 2005 11:09 am ]
Post subject: 
Looks to me like the bios can't find a boot sector, maybe a lilo problem?
Author:  BSquared [ Fri Nov 11, 2005 11:16 am ]
Post subject: 
I checked the lilo.config file and it appears to be ok - at least based on some other posts I found. I'm a noob, so it's entirely possible that I am missing something.

Is there anything specific in regard to lilo that I should be looking at?

And BTW, I belive the Debian install uses Grub...
Author:  cesman [ Fri Nov 11, 2005 1:19 pm ]
Post subject: 
The first thing I'd recommend is change your BIOS to boot from the hard drive. If that fails, search for 'chroot mount lilo'...
Author:  BSquared [ Fri Nov 11, 2005 5:54 pm ]
Post subject: 
Thanks for your suggestions. My BIOS has the HDD listed as the primary boot device, followed by the CDROM.

I ran LILO (the following text is the result) and still getting the DISK BOOT FAILURE message:

LILO version 22.6.1

Reading boot sector from /dev/sda
Warning: '/proc/partitions' does not exist, disk scan bypassed
Using MENU secondary loader
Calling map_insert_data

Boot image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.13.2-chw-3
Mapping RAM disk /boot/initrd.gz
Added Linux *

Skipping /vmlinuz.old
Writing boot sector
/boot/boot.0800 exists - no boot sector backup copy made


I have the same problem with GRUB, so I am not convinced it's a LILO problem. Any other thoughts?
Author:  BSquared [ Sun Nov 13, 2005 10:32 am ]
Post subject: 
Just wanted to give an update. I was able to successfully install KnoppMyth on a Western Digital 40GB PATA drive and had no problems with it booting. Appears taht the problem is with the SATA drive.

Obviously, I would like to use the 300GB drive (vs. 40GB) so if anybody has any suggestions...

Cheers,

-Bill
Author:  tjc [ Sun Nov 13, 2005 11:03 am ]
Post subject: 
Use them both! ;-) Seriously, there are a couple easy ways to do this described on the wiki. http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=AdditionalHarddriveHowTo

The quick and dirty way is to format the second drive, and mount it as /myth/tv. I did this for quite a while (many months) until I got around to setting up LVM. Frankly LVM is worth the minimal extra effort needed.

If you want to get it working with just the SATA drive I suspect you're in for much more work. At a guess the SATA drivers are loaded as a module and you're missing that module at boot time. You may need to create a new initrd (boot time RAM disk image) which contains the right drivers. There is some minimal information on doing this here on the wiki:
http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=KernelUpgradeHowTo
Author:  BSquared [ Mon Nov 14, 2005 3:03 pm ]
Post subject: 
Thanks for the additional info. Unfortunately, I only have space for a single drive in my case (I'm afraid mounting a second one would restrict the airflow).

I will look into creating a new initrd and let you know if I make any progress, but for the time being, I will settle for using the smaller PATA drive.

Cheers,

-Bill
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