[NBLUG/talk] Can't boot from Hard Drive

[Scrappy Laptop]

Since you can now boot from the HDD (even if the OS boot process fails, it does start, right?) and the CD drive is (assumed) usable, worse case scenario you can use the Dell F12 boot menu to boot from the CD and reinstall to the HDD after reformatting, etc.  

With enough mucking around it should be possible to clear out any bad drive id entries, but it it worth the trouble or can you quickly reinstall?



Dave Sisley <dsisley at sonic.net> wrote: Eric, et al:

I've disconnected the CD drive from the cable (and therefore the 
motherboard).  I've moved that cable to the primary IDE slot.  The drive 
is set jumper-wise to 'single or master'.  It didn't boot, so I went 
into the bios and the drive is in fact listed as the Primary Master.  I 
finally can see the hard drive as an option in choosing boot-device 
order.  It now tries to boot from the hard drive.  Hooray!

The hard drive seems to be completely bollocksed (sp?) however.  Boo!

If I try and boot to single user mode, I get a message re: filesystem 
check failure.  So I run fsck -y /dev/mapper/VolGroupWhatever (I copied 
it from df).

It says 'clean'. I boot.  Screen goes blank shortly after the GUI part 
of the boot process starts (this is FC4).  I managed to 'show details' 
during this part and saw very briefly an error message referring to 
/dev/hdc1.  Could that be the phantom CD drive?  I also quickly see the 
word 'superblock'.


they think it's still there?  Is this computer haunted?  Am I ever going 
to get any work done? >

I've just tried reconnecting the CD drive with another cable, to the 
secondary IDE slot.

Machine still no boot.  Hulk angry!  Drive all the way to Best Buy. GRRR!

Eric Landerville wrote:
> Dave,
> By saying the following,
>
> *SNIP*
> The drive is listed as the secondary master.
> *SNIP*
>
> I would say that you have the IDE ribbon cables plugged into the, not 
> wrong, but oppisite slots on the mother board. 
> Normal motherboards can only handle 4 IDE drives and there are two buses 
> for those drives, the primary and the secondary.  I would say that you 
> have your hard drive plugged into the secondary connector on the 
> motherboard.  Switch the CD and hard drive cables on the mother board 
> and see what happens. 
>
> Good luck,
>
> Eric
>
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at nblug.org
> http://nblug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
>
>
>   

_______________________________________________
talk mailing list
talk at nblug.org
http://nblug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk


 __________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://nblug.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20071024/cb67ddc3/attachment.htm