[conspire] Help with GRUB

[Paul Zander]

Rick,

Thank you for your patience.  I think at least I tamed the email format.

At this point, using a web based mail (Yahoo) allows using different computers and OS's.

Paul

--- On Thu, 11/5/09, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:

> From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> Subject: Re: [conspire] Help with GRUB
> To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
> Date: Thursday, November 5, 2009, 4:26 PM
> Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):
> 
> > Thanks for detailed advise.  Some specific replies
> are below.
> 
> Hmm.  Well.  I'd like to take a moment to attempt
> some constructive
> suggestions about how to do quoting in replies. 
> You're using:
> 
>    YahooMailWebService
> 
> ...which, like GMail, has some rather horrible and
> antisocial defaults 
> for reply semantics.  Here is a page (rather old; last

Yes those pages were rather old.  In the distant past, I recall a
selector, when adding people to the address book it asked if they
wanted messages in text or HTML.  Maybe that was the early Mozilla.

What I did was to go to the Options selection.
That gave a choice between formatting email as either
 text
 pictures and graphics.

After selecting "text", the composer window doesn't have the widgets for formatting.  It does have an option for "Rich Text".  

> 
> (Also, for some reason, you posted the same thing to the
> mailing list
> twice.)

That was a Yahoo screw-up.  I hit send.  Everything hung.  A long long time later, I got message "sorry, but you encountered a rare error. Try again." or something to that effect.  Actually it had sent the message, but got lost in updating my screen.
 

> > I'm still in the steep part of the learning curve on
> grub.   Knowing
> > about "b" would have been a useful thing.
> 
> I really do recommend that you start with the two links I
> posted
> immediately as recommended resources.  Here they are
> again:
> 
> http://lignuxer.blogspot.com/2007/02/restoring-gnu-grub_15.html

The sequence of "find", "root", "setup", "quit" which I tried were from 
this link.

> http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/grub/grub.htm
> 
> You might also, for surrounding context and overview, want
> to read
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRUB
> 

I also found this URL which specifically mentions the drive mapping. So far, it has not been the magic bullet I need.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=294074 

> > At this point, I can get grub to boot debian from the
> hard drive by
> > modifying menu.lst to read (hd2,4).  From the
> above, I now understand
> > that there are possibly cleaner fixes to my
> work-around.   I will
> > experiment with them.
> 
> Again, I would encourage you to _avoid_ fooling with the
> contents of
> menu.lst until you have tested particular combinations of
> settings for
> booting at the GRUB boot-time command line.  _Then_
> you can safely
> put those details into menu.lst, having validated them.
> 

I made sure that I had extra copies of menu.lst so I could back out
what I had done.

So before receiving your email, I modified menu.lst with 
root(hd2,4) and it boots Debian just fine.

I could not find a similar workaround for MS.

Now after booting from RescueCD.
(I am hand copying this between computer screens.
so  pardon possible typos.)

grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
  (hd0,4)
grub> root (hd0,4)
  Filesystem is ext2fs, partition type is 0x83

grub> kernel  /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-2-686 root=/dev/sda5 ro quiet
 [Linux-bzIMAGE, ...

grub> initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-2-686

Error 16: Inconsistent filesystem structure.

Several tries, but I have not been able to manually boot from grub.

So at this point, all I can do is boot Debian from the hacked menu.lst