LiveCD and Grub Rescue (only w/ HD attached?)

[HalfNote5]

Okay, so I'm trying to load up the SalixOS live CD. If I disconnect the hard drive, it pops right into XFCE and it's beautiful. I can fire up sshd and play to my heart's content (the box is, after all, on a high shelf).

Here's where it gets odd. If I connect a hard drive to the thing, it just boots to "Grub Rescue" where ls gives me (CD) and (HD0) and no other commands seem to do anything.

Thinking "okay, I have GRUB or LILO or something it doesn't like on the MBR," I wiped it. I loaded up an Arch linux live disc and did a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1.

I.E. if there USED to be anything on the MBR, there isn't anymore.

Sooo... I plug the little monster in and boot from CD........

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ERR: Unknown Filesystem
Rescue mode......
Blah blah
GRUB RESCUE>_

I'm about to try with a different hard disc, but really, it shouldn't be THAT big a deal, should it? All my other live discs will boot this machine with that HD attached, and I've gone through Arch, Mint, Debian, and SuSE. I even loaded up a Mandriva derivative on it with no probs.

Any thoughts are welcomed.


FOLLOWUP:

Just tried with another hard drive pulled out of a machine running Mint Debian Edition. Still no dice. It'll only boot with no HD in the machine.

[JRD]

Weird!

How your HD is attached to your computer? I mean with which technology/connection ? Somehow it seems grub is confused while trying to browse the device. Your idea about wiping out the MBR of that HardDrive was a good idea...but seems it still not enough.
When you have the grub rescue, could you try doing these command and tell what is report, please:

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# ls
# ls (hd0)
# ls (hd0,1)
# ls (hd0)/
# ls (hd0,1)/

[HalfNote5]

It's on a SATA cable.
Also, If I'm not mistaken, I've gone into the bios and set all the SATA devices to operate in IDE mode, but I can double-check.

UPDATE:

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ls (cd)

and

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ls (hd0)

give me "Unknown filesystem."

and

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ls (hd0,1)
ls (cd,1) 

both give me "No such partition"


I find it really weird that the CD's filesystem, too, is unrecognized. It COULD be loading from the hard drive - I wiped its MBR, but the rest of the data's probably still on there chillin' out. Stranger things have happened, but it's done it with two hard drives now...[/b]

[Adys]

Just a thought...

How your devices / drives are set in the boot order in your BIOS?

It seems like it is trying to boot into the first device (HDD?), and if it doesn't find it (no HDD connected) then it boots into the LIVE CD. But when the BIOS finds a HDD, it tries to boot it. Since the HDD can't boot (no MBR/BPB), the BIOS tries the second device (LIVE cd), which fails to boot as you expected, apparently since it is not following the expected path (BIOS -> LIVECD as first booting device, but BIOS -> first device "failed" -> second device).

Normally, I would expect the first device (HDD?) to try to boot and fail (no BPB) and then stop, but maybe your BIOS is trying to boot the second device (LIVE cd) after the first one "failed"?

Is the LIVE CD an exact burn of the original downloaded Salix ISO? Or was it customized in any way?

Anyway, just a thought. Probably the BIOS boot order is not related to the problem.

[HalfNote5]

Good thought, but the order is as follows:

1. USB CD-ROM (the live CD)
2. IDE CD Rom (currently disconnected)
3. Primary Hard drive
4. Bootable Add-in cards.

[Adys]

Could the USB connection be the conflict?

1. USB CD-ROM (the live CD)

With the HDD still connected, could you set the BIOS as:

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1. USB CD-ROM (the live CD)
2. NONE
3. NONE
4. NONE

And/or

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1. IDE CD Rom (currently disconnected, so connect it and use that optical drive)
2. NONE
3. NONE
4. NONE

Was the CD customized?

[HalfNote5]

Oi! I removed ALL the CD-roms (just for funsies) and the little ba###rd tries to boot to grub when it's just the hard drive, too, even though I've formatted and wiped it. Guess I missed something still slinking around in the MBR.

Lemme try a dd write from /dev/zero again (this time with bs=2048 and a count of 10) and we'll see if that doesn't make it change its tune.

Also, thanks for the suggestion on turning off the hard drive boot in the BIOS entirely. That would help in the event that someone else has the same problem, but doesn't feel like nuking whatever's already on their HD. I'll let you know how that goes, too. Cheers!

[corpsbum]

Just a quick note to let you know that HalfNote5 is not the only person with this issue. My copy of SalixOS Live DVD produces the same messages at boot on three different machines. No joy on any of them. I am like most users I suspect in that I don't research the forums enough to try and diagnose the issue; I just chuck the DVD in the round file and go back to what linux distro works on my machines. Wish I could try Salix though. Sounds interesting, just not working.

[Adys]

@corpsbum,

Unfortunately, there is no feedback from HalfNote5 yet, so we don't know what happened there.

Which EXACT Salix ISO did you download?

Additionally, follow the questions posted here in this topic to see if those give you some clue, and report back (maybe it would be best to open a separate topic for your case).