OpenSUSE Install :: Booting With Grub: How To Debug
May 3, 2011
I would like to build a sticky subject about repairing openSUSE boot.This article,once complete (not by me alone) should be made sticky (to have it in front of the forum)- these problems are frequent and disturbing.I know the great work done by please-try-again. But very often we don't need any script (and running a script from rescue mode is difficult) - that said I vote to have the pta scripts included in the rescue system !So I would like to focus on command line fixes.
I am currently running all my applications off a HD as I was unable to install the grub bootloader on my ocz pci express card (grub won't install on the pci express card as it is a raid0 array). I would like to use the HD for backup only and run everything off the ocz card - with the exception of booting (which is unfortunate but I didn't manage to make the pci express card boot). How is it possible to tell suse during the installation to create the /boot on the HD and the rest on the pci express card and also to allocate the remainder of the HD as empty storage area??
I installed Opensuse 11.3 on a separate partition to vista on my Acer 5115. It runs fine but the GRUB boot loader failed to show the Vista OS. I tried to add it by editing menu.As far as I can see (and I don't have much experience with these things) the Vista OS is there, on sda5, but doesn't boot correctly because the winload.exe is in the wrong directory. Why the sdax numbers are all rearranged is a mystery too, but I have reinstalled vista several times so that could be why.I don't have a vista recovery cd (wasn't given one), is there any way to fix this within opensuse (which works fine)?
I have been carrying out updates of both Vista & SuSE whenever i operate in them.
One (Not So) Fine Day, when i Choose from the Grub loader "Microsoft Windows Vista SP2" option it just din't boot into Vista. I have Tried many a time.
My First doubt was towards Vista only, so i choose the "Windows Recovery Mode" option from Grub. It went into the Recovery mode. I ran Memory Tests on Windows Partition, took its own sweet time, whatever missing indexes and all it carried out and finally gave the Thumbs Up result. After that, i carried out Startup Repairs, all came out well. So, Yet again i restarted and tried to get in Vista. Nope, dint work.
I'm dual booting Windows 7 and openSUSE. I attempted to start up my computer, and got ERROR 17 on the GRUB loading page. I am assuming this is related to me disabling the openSUSE uninstaller on startup in Windows.installer seemed completely superfluous.
I'm wondering how I would go about dual-booting Ubuntu with openSUSE installed first?
I'm just a little bit concerned about the versions of Grub overwriting the openSUSE version or theme or something.
Would it work okay if I just shrink my openSUSE partition and then set the Ubuntu installer to install Ubuntu to the free space only or do I need to edit the grub file and stuff?
Code: fdisk -l Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 3724 29912998+ 83 Linux /dev/sda2 29256 30401 9205245 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda3 3725 4271 4393777+ 5 Extended /dev/sda4 * 4272 12104 62918572+ 83 Linux /dev/sda5 3725 4271 4393746 82 Linux swap / Solaris
I want ot install a new opensuse 11.4 as yest another OS. Due to the fact that I already have 4 sda partitions, I have to make some changes. What I am thinking about is to copy the sda2 (windows recovery) data to some folder etc (nevermind), then delete the sda2. Then I want to create a new primary partition for the new suse 11.4 and install it. What is worying me is the grub boot menu. I was planning to edit the new one (the opensuse 11.4), with old data.
Code: ###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux### title Desktop -- openSUSE 11.2 - 2.6.31.5-0.1 root (hd0,3) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31.5-0.1-desktop root=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-Hitachi_HTS542525K9SA00_080105BB0F00WDHE41DC-part4 resume=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-Hitachi_HTS542525K9SA00_080105$ initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.31.5-0.1-desktop .....
Now my question is will the settings of (hda0,n), change due to the fact that I have deleted the sda2? I have a lot of unused space at the end of my disk and want to create a new "sda2" there.
I just installed 2.6.35.12-88.fc14.x86_64 via Software Update and rebooted. When selecting new kernel to boot from, the boot sequence doesn't finish. I am not sure how t o troubleshoot; I am prompted for the PassWord for encrypted /home, but after that, it freezes.
Recently, I upgraded 11.1 to 11.2. Everything seemed to go fine. However, for some reason the system boots with the debug kernel - 2.6.31.5-0.1-debug. According to Yast every kernel under the sun seems to be loaded on the system. Grub, however, gives two choices - one for the regular and one for the failsafe system. They both boot to the debug kernel.
How do I get this thing to load into the regular, as opposed to the debug, kernel?
I have big troubles with new mouse. It works properly in all cases except booting. It is really strange but if I restart the system (11.3), There is BIOS hdd detection, GRUB (I choose oS 11.3), after I can see about three text lines for short time and after only black screen. And system is halted.
If I disconnect the mouse, reset PC, choose in GRUB, I can see text lines, immediately there is a graphic screen, connect mouse and it works until next reboot.
I'm dual-booting windows 7 on (hd0,0) and Fedora 13 on (hd0,4) and it's working fine until I repaired my windows 7. Afiter I did the repair on my windows 7, The booting sequence now skips the grub menu and automatically boots into windows without allowing me to take my pick.
I recently had to reinstall windows on another partition on my hard drive due to there not being any good way to run unrealed under ubuntu (believe me, I've tried everything) Is there a way to install grub from windows without using a liveCD or booting to a USB? I have downloaded WINGRUB and to be fair I have no clue how to use it.I no longer can access my Ubuntu partition.
I've been running openSuse 11.2 for a while on my notebook.Today I turned it off at work and came home. When I tried to turn it on, it boots, shows a black screen written 'GRUB' and then NOTHING. It doesn't complete the boot process.
I started another thread about this to get help booting into openSUSE after Fedora rewrote my bootloader and deleted all other entries. I managed to fix it but I never did find out why the following commands caused my system to boot to the grub shell instead of the grub menu.
Code: grub root (hd0,3) setup (hd0) quit reboot
Can anyone explain to me why these commands caused my system to boot directly to a grub shell? It's as if there were no /boot/grub/menu.lst files for it to use, but after I got everything back to normal, the files were still there.
If it helps, this is how the drive was setup before and now, except Fedora was on /dev/sda4 and has since been deleted.
Code: Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 262 2104483+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda2 263 13316 104856255 83 Linux /dev/sda3 * 13317 14621 10482412+ 83 Linux
I have a used PC that came pre-installed with suse 11.2.Unfortunately, I do not have the install disk to use in case of whatever.I already know that when configuring a dual boot with Windows and Linux, it is recommended to install Windows first.I do not have that luxury now as 11.2 is installed and GRUB is the boot loader.Question is, if I boot the Windows 98 install disk on boot, how to not mess up GRUB and still add Windows 98 to GRUB menu?
One hard drive only here. 98gb free.It seems that W98 install will overwrite GRUB in this situation - causing problems. Maybe not, I don't really know for sure.I just need to install windows 98 on the same hard drive and if possible, have suse and w98 visible on boot in GRUB.
I have installed 11.2 next to my 11.1 version I have a few big problems with 11.2 and I like to completely remove it. there are 2 grub's active now. I want to remove the 11.2 grub and make the 11.1 grub master again, but I do not know where to change this, the MBR points to the 11.2 grub and changing menu.lst probably does not have any effect.
is it ever possible to do dual booting with grub(legacy) ever at all!. it is possible provided i take some pain, here is the link of that post [URL] i was coward and weak i didn't try that out then. but i did try it out. now so if u haven't seen the post .... I've installed Fedora 15 desktop(Gnome) with physical Logical volume called vg_fedora lv_root(ext4) ,lv_swap and lv_home(ext4), with 500MB /boot partition and had about 200GB free hard disk space ... so i wanted to install Scientific Linux 6.1 (because our school uses RHEL 6.1)
so, while running the installer I made (added) a logical volume lv_Scientific with ext4 FS and made its mount point (/) and used the MBR /boot which overwrote the Fedora /boot (completely OK and was as expected) i restarted after installation i got SL log in and as per the directions of the thread i copied the boot stanza from grub.conf of fedora 15 (which i already had copied and pasted into a text file and copied it from there)and pasted it into grub.conf of SL you may ask why did i choose same physical LVM too save swap space ... if i had made another physical LVM i had to make another swap ( i like LVM ... its cool)
completely unexpected happened Fedora now boots but not SL when grub starts i get this error 27 unrecognised commad and when i press <enter> i get grub menu with SL and fedora when i press on Fedora it works well i get my fedora login and i did login .. everything works fine but when i press SL it goes to the previous black screen grub error 27
I was unaware of the difficulties of installing and booting Ubuntu from the "onboard raid" that the NVIDIA nForce chipsets provide. However, I've managed to get it working reliably with one single caveat:
When update-grub builds the grub.cfg, it refers to all of my partitions as follows:
Code: menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.35-27-generic' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(/dev/mapper/nvidia_caifaefg,msdos5)'
[Code]...
So I'm guessing that the whole nvidia_blah,msdos5 is because of that. However, it doesn't seem to explain why Grub would THINK that would work and it in fact does not work. That's the biggest source of confusion on my part.
My questions are as follows: First off, because as an IT person I want to know: Why does this sort of change work? What does changing that device name change in GRUB's behavior? Is there a setting in /etc/default/grub that would change the way it's naming these RAID devices? Is there a value for this setting that would give me the device names that work, as explained above?
If there is no setting change I can make in /etc/default/grub, could I add a sed command on to the end of update-grub or can I make a modification to one of the scripts in /etc/grub.d? What sort of change would be recommended? How would I preserve this change through later package upgrades that would possibly rewrite these files?
I recently tried to upgrade my openSuSe 11.1 system using the instructions at:
SDB:System upgrade - openSUSE
I successfully got the system to 11.2, but the upgrade from 11.2->11.3 went awry. The installation froze during the update, and I had to start it over. The first issue I had to deal with was the fact that rpm had been upgraded and zypper hadn't, so zypper wouldn't function because older rpm files that it would search for had been deleted. After rolling back rpm to a previous version, I managed to complete the upgrade to 11.3 and everything looked good. However, when I rebooted the system, it hangs at a blank screen. More precisely, the system seems to get through all of the BIOS stuff and then hang while loading the OS (I assume). Although I've worked on Windows boxes for a long time, I'm a complete novice at OS installations/upgrades for Linux systems, so I'm not even quite sure where to begin to troubleshoot this. Ideally, I'd like to be able to fix the installation on the system to save the data on the hard drives, but I realize this might not be possible. My first thought was to use a recovery tool that I'd seen on some Linux installation CDs, but I see that for openSuSe 11.3 and on that utility has been dropped. I can, however, use the disk to get to the "Rescue" command prompt, so maybe there's something I can do from there?
I just formatted the partition that contains fedora 15 using windows.. Now when I attempt to boot my PC the grub bootloader comes up and I cannot boot anything.... The error that I get|| i feel i need a boot command to boot boot win7 from grub... grub propmts me " minimal bash-like line editing is supported. for the first word tab possible list a possible commands completion anywhere else tab list
How do I get debug symbols for glibc? I'm using oprofile when profiling applications. Unfortunately, the default glibc version that comes with SUSE 11.1 has the debug symbols stripped-out. That means that all libc functions get aggregated into one big blob under "glibc.so" and you can't tell whether you spend most of the time in memory allocation, syslog or lock related routines.
So, I've tried a myriad of different ways of getting the symbols. From trying to build glibc myself to hunting for dozens of different rpms on this site and on the Internet. So far - no positive results.
I followed the instructions at OpenSUSE: Bugreport KDE - openSUSE to install debug symbols for okular which seems to crash quite often for me. However gdb and the kde crash application are unable to find them. The kde app says its not a good crash report and I should follow the guide.. which has already been done.
I installed kdegraphics4-debuginfo kdebase4-runtime-debuginfo kdebase4-workspace-debuginfo kdelibs4-debuginfo libqt4-debuginfo
Is there a step I'm missing to get gdb to load the symbols or something?
We have 2 machines (quad core intel i5) running suse 11.2. They were clean installs and both suffer from this problem on around 50% of boot-ups. Other times, the system boots quickly and is fine.
Basically, one of the CPU's gets hammered to 100% (according to KDE system monitor) for around 10 minutes after boot up. Although the other three CPU's seem mostly idle, the system is very slow, to the point of being unusable until suddenly the system recovers and runs normally.
I've looked at 'top' and the KDE system monitor and both show no process taking more than a few % of the CPU. So it is a mystery as to what is taking up so much CPU and why it does it some days and not others !
One other thing, if you try to run virtualbox during this time, it (eventually) says that the kernel drives are not loaded - so possibly the kernel is stuck loading drivers. Infact, from dmesg, I can see that the system is still booting but other than the extended time stamps, the only obvious difference between a good boot and a bad one seems to be the line :
Code: [ 141.794727] hda-intel: IRQ timing workaround is activated for card #0. Suggest a bigger bdl_pos_adj. which is there after a slow boot. The sound works ok (as does everything else).
My old GoBook IX250 won't provide option of booting from any external sources (hdd, flash drive, etc.), but I would think there should be some editing done to end of the boot fs on internal hard drive which would instruct the boot loader to allow choice of OS on external hard drive for booting -- have no idea just what should write there to obtain this result;
A while back I set up TFTPD32 and apache on my windows machine to allow installation of openSUSE via PXE. The client machine would boot, drag the kernel off tftp, then start the installation from which was an apache alias to a mounted ISO of the 11.2 DVD. It worked quickly and easily. That is the internationally recognised Condition for Vista to perform its main function: sh1tting the bed. Configuration lost.
Now, in a couple hours of searching and experimenting, I can't find guidance on how to get that same setup back. SDBXE boot installation - openSUSE covers 90% of it, but I don't want the installation to connect to a repo and download new files - soundly killing my internet connection downloading files that are already on the install ISO I'm serving.I want it to find all it needs in the served directory holding the ISO contents.My pxelinux.cfg/default :
I am not the most computer savy, so bear with me. I have opensuse installed on my usb hard drive and recently had a windows crash that caused me to lose my opensuse boot menu/grub. Before the crash I had to have the usb drive plugged in in order to boot to windows or opensuse or I would get an error at startup....... I would like to avoid this. Is there anyway to make it so that when I turn on my computer It boots directly to windows, and if I want to go to opensuse then I can plug in my usb drive and manually boot to usb from my boot menu? I would run these two together on my computer but I share this computer and having to have my usb drive plugged in all the time kind of made them mad. So I guess my question is two fold..... Is this possible? And if so can I go into my hard drive through windows and place something in there to allow me to boot to it since my grub is back to the origional windows boot or do I need to use a live cd to access opensuse and do it that way?.
problem booting into xen domu. THe console shows this.
[ 1.457957] PCI: Fatal: No config space access function found [ 1.648029] bootsplash: found, but framebuffer can't handle it! [ 1.677603] i8042.c: No controller found.
I was trying to install a dual boot with OS X and this is what it told me:
"delete partition /dev/sda1"
As far as I can tell, this means it wants to delete OS X. On my mac's terminal, the linux partition is "disk0s3". Am I correct to assume that I should be custom partitioning in the OpenSUSE installer and have it create all its partitions out of sda3 only?
