Clueless about Grub?

[Sunday Silence]

I started installing Red Hat 7.2 on a Toshiba Laptop (460cdx) only to find out toshiba and Linux really not get along back then. Of course this didn't stop me.

Long story short I now only get this: grub>
when I boot. I'm trying to restore the laptop to win 95 but I somehow changed the boot order to HDD, CDROM, fd. Anyway out of this mess from grub> ?

[pbharris]

hey sunday,
all you are getting is the grub prompt - well, type help at the prompt to see what options are available. this kinda sounds like is not configured at all. unfortunately the grub PET assumes you have something that works already. can you select something beside the hd to boot from?
this may help too.
http://www.gnu.org/manual/grub/html_mono/grub.html#FAQ

[Sunday Silence]

Thanks m8, I'm gonna stick with this linux if kills all us :-\

Looks like you boys and girls have an excellant resource going here, I'll stick around and try and learn somthin

[Schotty]

You could try rerunning the RedHat install, and do an upgrade. That should be able to fix grub. Odd that happened in the first place, however.

[Sunday Silence]

I've read elsewhere about these early Toshiba laptops being a strange breed. Put the whole thing on hold as I got Redhat dual booting on the desktop PC.

Guess I'll hit the pets and have some fun before I go back to laptop. Thanks for all your help.

Having theings go wrong seems to provide a fundemental education for me in the long run so this is actually a good thing

[kornp]

From the grub> prompt you should be able to boot your system if you know your partition setup and the name of your kernel. If you know the name of your kernel (possible "bzImage&quot you can type

find /boot/bzImage

and that'll spit out something along the lines of "(hd0,0)" which is your boot partition, that is, if it can find the kernel. If that works, or if you know what partition the kernel is on, you can type this:

kernel (hd0,0)/boot/bzImage ro root=/dev/hda2

replacing (hd0,0) with the partition your kernel is on, and bzImage with the name of your kernel. Also, replace hda2 with whatever your root partition is. If it gives you the message saying the image is found type:

boot

and cross your fingers

Just a quick note on partitions, /dev/hda1 is primary master IDE device, partition one, /dev/hda3 is primary master partition 3, etc. But grub's scheme is slightly different, (hd0,0) is primary master, partition 1, and (hd2,1) would be secondary master, partition 2.

Hope that helps you out, and good luck with the tux

[horus]

[quote author=Sunday Silence link=board=1;threadid=6744;start=0#63345 date=1049490206]
I've read elsewhere about these early Toshiba laptops being a strange breed. Put the whole thing on hold as I got Redhat dual booting on the desktop PC.

Guess I'll hit the pets and have some fun before I go back to laptop. Thanks for all your help.

Having theings go wrong seems to provide a fundemental education for me in the long run so this is actually a good thing
[/quote]

Right you are about things going wrong - great way to learn if you stick with it. Have you checked out the Linux On Laptops webpage to see what they have on your Toshiba? Hang on a bit, I'll nip out and get the URL - it's http://www.linux-laptop.net

Also - you might try LILO instead of GRUB - may just work better for your configuration... I usually prefer LILO, but GRUB works better on my ThinkPad, so maybe it'll work the other way for your Toshiba? Look for it on the installation as an option box. You might also see if Linux will boot from your boot disk (made one, didn't you?) or from LOADLIN.

Hope it goes well for you.

Later On,
horus

[Sunday Silence]

Oh yeash thanyou one and all, nothin but good info here.

On the Toshiba I apparently have grub installed and nothing else. hope to get some time this weekend to werk with the toshba.

The desktop install went well with exceptiion of netwerk card or internet config but make read manual and then I'll bug you about that.

Thanks again. The thing I like most about linux is it really makes you learn the fundemtals of OS and even Hardware to an extent. Wish I'd done this years ago.

A karma point for your good attitude. Most people, when faced with adversity, will knuckle under. Linux users remain and overcome. 8)