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General discussion

Fedora Core4 boot problem

Aug 20, 2005 6:50AM PDT

The short form:

I just installed Fedora Core4, but the system won't boot. I get:

DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

The long form:

I have 3 SATA hard drives labelled by fedora as sda, sdb,sdc. The driver used for intall is sata_nv.

Installation went smoothly without any errors. But it won't boot.

I tried fedora core 3, same problem.

Grub is installed, and the contents of grub.conf, fstab, mtab are shown below.


/etc/mtab

/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 / ext3 rw,defaults 0 0
/dev/sda1 /boot ext3 rw,defaults 0 0
/dev/proc /proc proc rw,defaults 0 0
/dev/sys /sys sysfs rw,defaults 0 0


/boot/grub/grub.conf

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
# root (hd0,0)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
# initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedor Core4 (2.6.11-1.1369_FC4)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.img


/etc/fstab

/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
/dev/shm /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sys /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 swap swap defaults 0 0


I have samples of the same files from fedora core 1 if you would like to see them.

Thx.
Richie.

Discussion is locked

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Try again.
Aug 20, 2005 10:26AM PDT

For some reason, with the Fedora series, I also have problems booting after a fresh installation. I haven't used FC4, but I suggest trying a fresh install again. Otherwise, I have a last resort idea if you are interested which has always worked for me

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Still no luck
Aug 20, 2005 10:55AM PDT

lilsim89,

Thanks for your response.

I just finished another fresh install. I've tried FC3, FC4, both the i386 and x86_64 versions. No luck in booting up the machine after install.

I'm stuck currently unless I find an answer to this problem. So your other suggestion is welcome.

Thx,
Richie.

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FC4 booting failure
Aug 20, 2005 6:57PM PDT

I had the same problem with FC4 32 and 64 bit, from two different sources, on two different machines (32 and 64 bit CPU:s resp.), and gave up. MEPIS 3.3.1 works faultlessly on both.
Cheers
"septus"

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Same here!
Aug 21, 2005 5:18AM PDT

Could never repair MBR after installing XP. There isn't even a way to do so in Linux Rescue. Went back to Mandrake 10.2. I have only had one problem with it I couldn't resolve (Nautilus pop-up when loading audio cd).
I can live with that. chuck

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How to delete mbr
Aug 21, 2005 8:58AM PDT

You can delete mbr in linux as follows:

Insert your rescue disk
Go through the menu up to the prompt.
Type chroot /mnt/sysimage
Then issue the command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

Where hda is the partition with mbr.

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fixed..
Aug 21, 2005 5:37AM PDT

It turns out my problem was with the sata raid drivers provided by nvidia.

I turned off acpi and sata raid in the bios, and FC4 fired up perfectly.

My cpu is an amd64, so my version of FC4 is x86_64 as opposed to i386. Everything seems to be working fine so far.