I'm installing debian on my home server, as it hadn't been used in a year after I moved and the gentoo install was out of date enough to make updating it daunting.

I ripped out all the hard drives besides one 30GB as the master on the primary IDE channel.

The debian install seems to go fine, but on reboot it starts grub and says "grub loading stage 1.5 read error" and doesn't get any further. Went through the expert install, loaded grub, rebooted, the same thing happened. (repeated this probably 10 times). Tried lilo out of frustration, and it booted up nicely. Apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, got a warning about needing to reboot as I was installing the same kernel I already had. Rebooted - and it says the drive isn't bootable.

Any ideas what's causing this? The kubuntu install couldn't get past a reboot either.

Matthew

eww.. that doesn't sound fun.

The first thing I would do is boot with a utility CD (ubuntu live, knoppix live) and either badblocks with a rw test, or fsck -cc the root filesystem.

My questions.. (forgive me if they sound like "duh, I checked that")

IDE bios settings.. make sure it's not fixed set to the wrong drive size, or auto-detecting the wrong drive geometry.. (LBA? whatever)

Is there anything on the IDE chain that could be causing issues. CD-ROM set to slave, but master doesn't like having slave drives without a "single->master" jumper

FSCK! did you try badblocks? badblocks with RW test? fsck -cc?

What brand of IDE drive is this?

Thanks for the help. This is kind of my one-night-a-week project, so it's taken me a while to get back to it.

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IDE bios settings.. make sure it's not fixed set to the wrong drive size, or auto-detecting the wrong drive geometry.. (LBA? whatever)

Sees it fine, shows up as the master drive on the first IDE chanel.

Quote:
Is there anything on the IDE chain that could be causing issues. CD-ROM set to slave, but master doesn't like having slave drives without a "single->master" jumper

Nope. It's the only thing on the chain. The CD drive is on the third IDE chanel by itself.

Quote:
FSCK! did you try badblocks? badblocks with RW test? fsck -cc?
Not yet.

So on reading this I decided to try another hard drive. Which worked perfectly. Unfortunatly, I want to use the 30GB drive as the system drive, and use the 250GB drives in the raid array.

So, I tried zeroing out the drive, and trying again. Got bored, so I didn't give it time to finish, but gave it a good lone while. Same problem. I'm running badblocks destructively now.

Quote:
What brand of IDE drive is this?

Western Digital. 30GB. Bought it from circuit city years ago, it's been in quite a few systems but I've never had a problem with it.

I'll report back when badblocks finishes. If I don't have any luck I'll probably bin the drive and find a different small one if that'll solve the problem.

Matthew

Gave badblocks an hour, and got bored as it didn't output anything at all while it was running. Found a 10GB drive, threw it in, and it worked fine. Downloading 500mb of debian archives at the moment. I'll probably be asking questions about configuring the raid array tomorrow.

Matthew