At 11:44 AM +0530 4/13/05, sherlock@vsnl.com wrote:

On Tuesday 12 April 2005 18:44, Vickram Crishna wrote:

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Does anyone know how to get around this? I get persistent GRUB failure, Error 15.

Afair error 15=file not found. means your root partition is not set properly in grub. Note grub partition numbers begin with zero so if root is on first ide drive first partition your grub menu.lst would look like

I had the borrowed RH9 disks for a few days, and spent many entertaining hours trying to figure out exactly what Sherlock meant by what seemed on the face of it to be perfectly simple instructions. In fact, Ryan also sent a very simple guide the next day, but possibly the difference there was about whether the bootloader was installed in MBR (yes, I hope) or not (in which case his help would probably have worked). Many thanks to both of you, but I am sorry to say I still need help.

title deb-2.6.10 root(hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz boot=/dev/hda1 dma acpi append="whatever"

here is my menu.lst

I could boot up using the RH9 install disk and going to the command line, but failed miserably to find the menu.lst file.

You dont need to reload grub once it is installed, just edit /boot/grub/menu.lst

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Now unfortunately I do not have the RH9 disks anymore (though I may get another copy back in a day or two), but it didn't seem to be a major hassle, since I still have my Ubuntu Live CD, from which I can see my whole system graphically and execute line commands as well. As I mentioned before, I had an issue with the install CD of Ubuntu, which failed to install correctly (in fact, not at all), the Live CD works fine. RH9 installs correctly, except for the problem with Grub (at least, I hope that's the only problem, or like Arnie, I'll be back).

Right now, I just can't find the menu.lst file, nor can I locate even the grub.conf file. Maybe neither one has properly installed at all? The /grub folder inside the /boot folder contains the following files: device.map e2fs_stage1_5 fat_stage1_5 ffs_stage1_5 jfs_stage1_5 minix_stage1_5 reiserfs_stage1_5 stage1 stage2 vstafs_stage1_5 xfs_stage1_5, and a folder: splash.xpm.gz

My question is, can I manually write an entirely new boot loader to MBR without reinstalling (especially since even the install disk didn't seem to be able to do that automatically, and the Ubuntu installer wants to rewrite the partitions, which I guess will lose me the RH9 installation)? My active partitions (ext3 fs) are hda6 (/) and hda7 (/usr), and I have hda8 (swap) also. Other partitions on the disk are Windows98 fs where I already have a Win98 installation and data.

I have looked up various Linux help sites after googling, but they advise on editing the existing grub and lilo bootloaders, not writing new ones.