[ale] Can no longer boot one of my drives - SOLVED

[Trey Sizemore]

On Thu, 20 Dec 2007 10:17:03 -0500
Jim Lynch <ale_nospam at fayettedigital.com> wrote:

> Trey Sizemore wrote:
> > Hi all-
> >
> > I'm hoping someone can help with the issue I'm having.  Here's a
> > quick rundown of the situation:
> >
> > Desktop machine with 2 500GB SATA drives.  One drive has both
> > Windows VISTA (1st partition) and Fedora 7 (sda2 is / and sda3
> > is /home)
> >
> > Second drive only has only openSUSE 10.3 (sdb1 is /, sdb2 is swap,
> > sdb3 is /tmp and the rest is an LVM with HOME, OPT, USR, and VAR)
> >
> > I use GAG (boot loader) to boot and have entries for all 3 operating
> > systems.  I have been using this setup successfully for quite a
> > while now.
> >
> > I was most recently in openSUSE and shut down the machine Monday
> > morning to go out of town.  When I came back last night, I could
> > boot into either Vista or Fedora, but not openSUSE.  Trying to do
> > so gives the error: "Sector boot not found or invalid".  
> >
> > I went into the "add an OS" setup to look at how the drives were
> > being seen.  It looks like:
> > Drive 1
> > A Boot from floppy
> > B 07h NTFS/Windows
> > C 83h Linux EXT2
> > D 83h Linux EXT2
> >
> > Drive2
> > A Boot from floppy
> > B 76h
> >
> > That's it for Drive2.
> >
> > I suppose it could be a bad drive, but I've not seen anything with
> > the drive prior to this to suggest that.  The cabling looks good
> > between the drive and motherboard.  Any ideas here as to how to go
> > about troubleshooting and hopefully getting this drive back?
> >
> > Let me know if any more info is required, and thanks for any and all
> > help!
> >   
> First thing I'd do is boot Fedora and  run fdisk -l as SU to see what 
> the partition tables look like.
> Then try to mount the partitions from SDB.  If they all mount, then
> run fsck on them after a umount.  If they are OK, the problem is with
> the boot  but I don't know anything about GAG so I can't help there.
> Jim.


Thanks to all who replied.  I re-installed grub on the MBR after
booting into openSUSE using the installation media.  When I rebooted, I
was met with a error 21 grub message.

Long story short and after some googling, some people were receiving
this error (disk not found) when having a USB drive plugged in at the
time of boot.  Sure enough, I had an iPod shuffle plugged in.
Unplugging it and rebooting allowed grub to come up fully.

Still not quite sure why this causes a problem, but that was it.

Thanks again all.

-- 
Cheers,
Trey
----
 
Adversity is the trial of principle.
Without it, a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not. 
                 --Henry Fielding
 
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