[vox-tech] Help - Grub error 21

[Chris Jenks]

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> My computer at work is a WinXP system.  Yesterday I used a Debian Sarge
> official installer to make the system into a dual boot system.  Everything
> went fine until the reboot.  When the system reboots, I see:
> 
>    Grub loading stage 1.5
>    Grub loading, please wait...
>    Error 21
> 
> The system doesn't boot at all.

   Dear Peter,

   I can sure sympathize. I just got through "playing" with my Dad's 
system, with Debian on the primary master and WinXP on the secondary 
master. He is leery of getting stuck in Linux, so being unable to boot 
Linux for several months didn't help! The symptoms were, using a recent 
install of Sarge from CD, that grub would repeat "GRUB GRUB ...", or LILO 
would give "L 99 99..." or "L 02 02..." depending on whether I reran lilo. 
The fix was to go into the bios and change the setting for the primary 
master (containing Linux) from "auto" to "user", which caused the setting 
for the number of heads for the disk to change from 16 (I think) to 255, 
and reduced the number of clusters. This allowed Debian to boot, but 
Windows would hang. I had to remap the drives in lilo.conf to get Windows 
to boot properly.

   Yours,

     Chris