How to configure Grub to launch the configfile command automatically...?

[The Linuxator]

update :

I kind of got it to work, it was a very silly yet strange thing, the correct grub.conf data should be as follows :

default=0
timeout=10
hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core 5 test 2
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-initrd-2.6.15-1.1826.2.10_FC5smp
initrd /initrd-2.6.15-1.1826.2.10_FC5smp.img


Why the hell did they use an smp kernel for ?? I couldn't find the reason why they did it.


One last question before I am done configuring this machine, everytime I bootup the floppy I have to go and type :

grub> configfile /boot/grub/grub.conf

How can I make grub just bypass the grub terminal and immediately do whatever the grub.conf file needs it to do ?



I bought a SYBA SATA card, that has the SiL3112RAID chipset, well I slapped that thin in my IBM Intellistation E-pro, and started Fedora Core 4 setup, well, before anaconda starts right after the media check message, I see a popup saying that the sili-sata drivers are laoding, then the system starts giving out some insane output with a blue background and the system stalls, so I tried again, but this time with linux noprobe as my argument, well before anaconda starts, I get a message informing me that an hdd wasn't found , it gives me an option to load specefice drivers, I chooose tthat, and select the silicon image SATA controller driver option , after it loads it, I end up with the same crazy output and system freeze, what should I do ?

I tried not loading the SATA driver and just jumping to anaconda to make sure that's the only problem, and anaconda and X work perfect, but of course I can't go anywhere becasue I don't have an hdd detected.

The SATA controller detects my Harddrive on boot, so no problem there, TBH I am doing a low level format on the hdd through the SATA controller as I type this, so no hardware issue there.

The harddrive that is being used with the controller is a westerndigital SE SATA drive.

link to SYBA SATA controller

 

[The Linuxator]

Sorry for the empty post!

 

[xtknight]

Disable APIC in BIOS and see if it works.

 

[The Linuxator]

Originally posted by: xtknight
Disable APIC in BIOS and see if it works.

If you mean disable ACPI I already tried that,and still no go.

 

[The Linuxator]

Upon loading the driver sata-sili I get an option to pass some optional arguments for it, can anything be done through that ?

I even went as far as disabling the following all together :

- Parallel ports.
- Onboard Ethernet
- ACPI
- APM
- Serial ports
- USB controller
- FDD controller
...etc

Basically the only things that I have running are :

- IDE controller (for the setup CD)
- SATA Controller (PCI)
- AGP 2x Video card Matrox G200
- PS/2 ports

And that's it, I am wondering what else can be done here, I have been trying since last night and I really would like to use my fast 7200RPM SATA Drive in this old machine as I have no free IDE Harddrives lying around, and it would cost me the price of the SATA controller just to ship it back for a refund, so it would be very good if I can get this to work, on the Newegg reviews page, people are reporting that this card is working with no issues with Kernel 2.6 + which is what Fedora Core 4 has, what else can cause such a thing ?

EDIT : I have just ran memtest86+ V1.55 and the result is :


Tst : 6
Pass : 0
Failing Address : 000038a5fa0 -56.3MB
Good : fff7ffff
Bad : fff7ffef
Err-Bits : 00000010
Count : 2
Chipset is : Intel i 440BX with 224 MB of memory PC-100

But I doubt if this minor instability can be the reason for the failure though.

 

[n0cmonkey]

First, replace the ram. Bad ram can do anything it wants. It has the power.

EDIT: I thought a beta for FC5 was out, maybe I'm wrong.

 

[xtknight]

The failing address is only 56.3MB through. If the installer uses 56.3MB or more you're in trouble. Replacing the bad RAM is the first thing to do, even if it doesn't solve this particular problem.

http://froogle.google.com/froogle?hl=en...0%20ram&btnG=Google+Search&sa=N&tab=wf

If you don't want to replace your RAM then this is all I can do to help you further:

APIC isn't the same as ACPI. Try booting the kernel with these arguments:

vmlinuz nolapic noapic acpi=off irqfixup

See if that works. It did for me when it was hanging at my sata_nv controller. The BIOS solution worked the best but I guess you don't have APIC options in your BIOS. Actually just try it with irqfixup to start with, and then try the whole thing.

And are you sure a system that ancient even supports a SATA controller?

 

[The Linuxator]

Originally posted by: xtknight
The failing address is only 56.3MB through. If the installer uses 56.3MB or more you're in trouble. Replacing the bad RAM is the first thing to do, even if it doesn't solve this particular problem.

http://froogle.google.com/froogle?hl=en...0%20ram&btnG=Google+Search&sa=N&tab=wf

If you don't want to replace your RAM then this is all I can do to help you further:

APIC isn't the same as ACPI. Try booting the kernel with these arguments:

vmlinuz nolapic noapic acpi=off irqfixup

See if that works. It did for me when it was hanging at my sata_nv controller. The BIOS solution worked the best but I guess you don't have APIC options in your BIOS. Actually just try it with irqfixup to start with, and then try the whole thing.

And are you sure a system that ancient even supports a SATA controller?

I wanted to see if this bug was fixed in FC5 so I downloaded the FC 5 4.91 and everything works just fine, I am installing FC5 ATM on that machine.

But what I need help with is that, as you guys know a system that old doesn't support SATA boot options in BIOS, initially when I purchased the SATA controller it was for the purpose of having extra storage, however, I decided when I got it that I want to use it for a main SATA HDD, the only issue will be on bootup, so I was wondering, how can I creat a Floppy with a command on it to make the system boot from sda ?

That way I set the BIOS startup sequence with FDD as the primary boot device, then that floppy is used on every bootup.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Is there an option to boot from scsi or something in the BIOS? That _might_ work.

I wanted to see if this bug was fixed in FC5 so I downloaded the FC 5 4.91 and everything works just fine, I am installing FC5 ATM on that machine.

Sweet! There is an FC5. I'm not crazy.

Or am I?

 

[The Linuxator]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Is there an option to boot from scsi or something in the BIOS? That _might_ work.

I wanted to see if this bug was fixed in FC5 so I downloaded the FC 5 4.91 and everything works just fine, I am installing FC5 ATM on that machine.

Sweet! There is an FC5. I'm not crazy.

Or am I?

Don't get your hopes up so fast

No the BIOS has no SCSI boot options, that's why I was intending for the SATA controller to be for SATA storage, but after getting it I wanted to use it with my 7200 rpm 8 MB WD so that I can give that old system a speed boost from that old dusty 4200 rpm that used to reside in it.

So my plan is to setup FDD as the primary boot device, and on the floppy have a command in it that once executed boots sda, how do I go around that ?

 

[xtknight]

I use a floppy to boot off /dev/sda but Mandriva set it up for me. Try grub-install /dev/fd0. Then just boot from the floppy. It should automatically be setup for you, SATA or not.

From GRUB docs:

Note that GRUB does not distinguish IDE from SCSI - it simply counts the drive numbers from zero, regardless of their type. Normally, any IDE drive number is less than any SCSI drive number, although that is not true if you change the boot sequence by swapping IDE and SCSI drives in your BIOS.

 

[The Linuxator]

Originally posted by: xtknight
I use a floppy to boot off /dev/sda but Mandriva set it up for me. Try grub-install /dev/fd0. Then just boot from the floppy. It should automatically be setup for you, SATA or not.

From GRUB docs:

Note that GRUB does not distinguish IDE from SCSI - it simply counts the drive numbers from zero, regardless of their type. Normally, any IDE drive number is less than any SCSI drive number, although that is not true if you change the boot sequence by swapping IDE and SCSI drives in your BIOS.

I only have two systems around ATM , my Laptop which doesn't have a floppy drive, and my INtellistation.
I can only manage to install Grub through my secondary system (because it has a Floppy), how do I install grub to a floppy in this situation ? I can't access Fedora Core yet.

 

[The Linuxator]

I tried installing grub from a Mepis live cd, at the grub terminal I start with

root (fd0)

then

setup (fd0)

But I get

Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists....no

Anyone know a better way to make a bootable floppy so I can boot from sda ?

 

[kamper]

Can't you make a boot floppy during the install process of Fedora? I seem to remember there having been an opportunity for that at one point. Or maybe that was way back in the redhat days

 

[xtknight]

Use grub-install. It did everything for me, painless. grub is really hard to use for some reason. I pity the day I have to deal with that thing again...

 

[The Linuxator]

Originally posted by: xtknight
Use grub-install. It did everything for me, painless. grub is really hard to use for some reason. I pity the day I have to deal with that thing again...

It's not working , I am getting an error message back :

" '/boot/grub' : Read-only file system "

 

[nweaver]

Faulty ram can cause MANY MANY odd errors

 

[The Linuxator]

Originally posted by: nweaver
Faulty ram can cause MANY MANY odd errors

Well I am stuck with it for the time being
Anyway it's only a secondary machine, and I am getting it up and running so that I can have and FTP server at home, and also when I am at home save my Thinkpad some abuse, but will be replacing faulty memory as soon as I get the chance.

 

[The Linuxator]

Playing around with Grub I got to understand why the floppy wasn't created right, and now I got the floppy setup with GRUB by doing the following :
-copying the contents of grub/i-386/ to the floppy 's boot folder .
- grub

grub> root (fd0)

setup (fd0)

and it all worked

Now I am at the GRUB's floppy boot screen, how do I make it copy the GRUB's configuration from sda, so that it would boot up immeidatly instead of me going through the GRUB terminal everytime ?

 

[The Linuxator]

Come on guys this is an easy one, someone ought to know ?

 

[The Linuxator]

After looking at my system files here on my laptop I noticed that I will need a grub.conf file on the floppy as there is one on my laptop in /etc . A closer inspection of my Fedora grub.conf file will give us :


# 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 (hd0,1)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
# initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core (2.6.14-1.1656_FC4)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.14-1.1656_FC4 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.14-1.1656_FC4.img
title Fedora Core (2.6.14-1.1653_FC4)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.14-1.1653_FC4 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.14-1.1653_FC4.img
title Fedora Core (2.6.12-1.1381_FC3)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.12-1.1381_FC3 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.12-1.1381_FC3.img
title Fedora Core (2.6.11-1.1369_FC4)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.img
title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1




As I am analyzing the situation I will need to make a grub.conf as follows :


# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
#boot=/dev/hda
default=0
timeout=10
hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core 5 test 2
root (sda0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-initrd-2.6.15-1.1826.2.10_FC5 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.15-1.1826.2.10_FC5.img


I will test if this config file works.

EDIT:

Result is : "Error 23 :Error while parsing number "

So what is wrong with that config file , what should I change in it ?

 

[xtknight]

root (sda0,0) is wrong.
It should just be root (hd0,0). It's all independent to GRUB. It doesn't know SCSI/SATA from IDE.

 

[The Linuxator]

Originally posted by: xtknight
root (sda0,0) is wrong.
It should just be root (hd0,0). It's all independent to GRUB. It doesn't know SCSI/SATA from IDE.

OK modified it and I see the mistake in it.

Now it goes over that step and once it starts reading from the hd it says :

Filesystem type ext2fs, partition type 0x83
kernel /vmlinuz-initrd-2.6.15-1.1826.2.10_FC5 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet

Error 15 : File not found"

I can't acess my hdd to check out the files and their locations, but I would be able to get it running if someone can tell me what is the exact naming of the files on their system for FC5 4.91 ?

 

[The Linuxator]

OK I got to work, it was a very silly yet strange thing, the correct grub.conf data should be as follows :

default=0
timeout=10
hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core 5 test 2
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-initrd-2.6.15-1.1826.2.10_FC5smp
initrd /initrd-2.6.15-1.1826.2.10_FC5smp.img


Why the hell did they use an smp kernel for ?? I couldn't find the reason why they did it.


One last question before I am done configuring this machine, everytime I bootup the floppy I have to go and type :

grub> configfile /boot/grub/grub.conf

How can I make grub just bypass the grub terminal and immediately do whatever the grub.conf file needs it to do ?

 

[The Linuxator]

bump