GRUB not booting

[btsdev]

Hi,

I had a P3 compaq 'deskpro' with a shot hard drive sitting around so i figured I would get a new WD 120gb ide hdd and stick it in there to make a (debian) server.

i took out the old drive, put the new one in, the hard disk errors in BIOS went away and it said 120gb drive on ide0 (!! remember this; the mobo detects it). now i put in my debian netinstall cd, got the reboot part, rebooted and i'm stuck eternally on:

"GRUB Loading stage1.5.

GRUB loading, please wait..."

Do you guys think I have to flash the BIOS? Am I screwed or no? heh

Thanks in advance if you can offer any advice,
Brian

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, A new harddrive usually needs partitioning and formating. You don't say what OS you plan to use. Drive manufacturer has the necessary programs for download. 98SE will have external programs on the Boot Floppy. XP will do it for you if you set up to boot from the CD and stick the XP CD in before you boot. Luck, Jim

 

[birdpup]

GNU Grub Wiki
Error messages reported for Grub

 

[wpshooter]

I don't think he is trying to install a Windows O/S but Linux.

Just off the cuff, with a computer that old, P3, I have my doubts that you are probably going to find a bios update that will allow this machine to function with that new drive. However, since you are saying that the bios seems to be recognizing the drive, my first attempt would be to do like the other person suggested and get a WIN98SE boot diskette and FDISK & then FORMAT the drive first answering yes to the large support question and if that does not work try formatting answering NO.

But first, you might take a shot at seeing if Compaq has a bios update.

Good luck.

 

[Matt2]

Isn't it mostly the OS that determines the max size for an HD?

 

[gnumantsc]

If the bios does not show up in bios means that you have to like you said flash the bios. You'd be surprised at the amount of bioses are still being updated.

Worse case scenario you would need to buy a PCI card to use the HD on. Might have a bit of problem getting Debian on there.

 

[nweaver]

I doubt that you would have problems with debian on an external controller. We have it on cf boot on some older sparc's here.


I would say boot off the live CD, check your grub.conf. Probably mistyped the line for kernel? Try a root= statement? etc.