Re: GRUB-1.96 won't boot, boots into rescue prompt

[Pavel Roskin]

On Tue, 2008-03-11 at 11:00 +0100, Jelle Geerts wrote:

> Phew, I uninstalled Gentoo and reinstalled Arch so I can't remember
> for sure what modules were listed :(
> I can remember 'ext2' was loaded.

Interesting.  If some modules were loaded, then disk access was working
initially.  But it stopped working at some point.  Maybe it was the
"ata" module?  It should not be loaded by default, but maybe it was
loaded for some reason.

> Also, 'insmod normal' resulted in the same "error: unknown device" error.

That's not surprising considering that no devices can be accessed.

I normally verify the GRUB installation by running this as root:

qemu -hda /dev/sda

where /dev/sda is the bootable hard drive.  It should be safe if you
don't try to boot anything.  It's even possible to install GRUB 2, test
it with qemu and then install GRUB 1 without having to reboot.

Checking with qemu can separate BIOS issues from issues with GRUB 2
itself (wrong module dependencies) and grub.cfg (loading "ata" module).

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin