[vox-tech] Help - Grub error 21

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Wed 23 Feb 05,  7:52 AM, Chris Jenks <jenks at resonance.org> said:
> 
> 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,

Interesting.  At some point, I should like to understand this.  I feel like
I understand the boot process, but every so often, something like this
happens to show me that I really know 'nuttin.  I like this suggestion
because:

   * Like Jon's suggestion, I don't have to monkey with cables and pins.

   * What I forgot mention in my post is that I used Timo's rescue disk
     to use lilo (which I'm more familiar with).  When I reboot using lilo
     as the primary bootloader, I saw:

     07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07
     07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 
     07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 

     and "07" is very close to your "02".  Just kidding.  :)
   
     Anyhow, after my lilo idea didn't pan out, I reinstalled Debian hoping
     that a cosmic ray launched from Rigel-7 found its way into the CPU the
     instant grub was installing, causing it to do the Wrong Thing.
     Unfortunately, either grub just didn't want to work or there were two
     cosmic rays from Rigel-7...

> but Windows would hang. I had to remap the drives in lilo.conf to get
> Windows to boot properly.
 
Yeah, I'm come head to head with this one too.  On my gaming machine, I've
had to remap the drives with grub.  I'm sure there's a way to do that with
lilo too, but I don't know how.  So all my computers use lilo except for
that one machine.

Grub has some nice features, but I have to admit, I've spent so much time
learning lilo, I think I may be suffering from old dog learning new tricks
syndrome.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Pete

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