Mepis won't boot.....

[kenmo]

I recently installed Mepis 7 on my computer. I have two ide hard drives and one ide dvd writer.

The boot hard drive was master on the primary channel (with partitins root & home) and the dvd was slave. the second ide hd was master with no slave on the secondary ide channel. This drive was data only.

Since I replaced my second hard drive with a sata drive, I get grub errors when I reboot my computer.

In bios the sata appears to be on channel 3 but I think grub or Mepis may think the sata is hd0,0. I messed around with the
menu.lst but I still get grub errors (error 22 and or error 15)...

If I disabled the sata drive in bios, mepis boots fine.

Any thoughts... ???

[disturbed1]

hda = / and /home
hdb = DVD
hdc = was there now gone... just storage?
sda = new drive?

Sounds like your BIOS is emulating SATA to IDE or remapped your drives to a different order. My intel motherboard did this, and is quite a PITA when you don't know what happened.

When you boot the PC, and you choose which option in Grub, you can press E to edit the choice, then E again to edit the command.

It should say something like -
root (hd0,0)
grub edit > kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1

change the hd0,0 and /dev/hda1 to another drive.
hd0,0 = /dev/hda1
hd1,0 = /dev/hdb1
hd2,0 = /dev/hdc1

Press b to boot.

This does not write the changes to /boot/grub/menu.lst you'll have to do that once you get into your system. You could also load a live CD and see how the drives are being mounted.

[tekkieman]

I believe in Mepis (since 7.0) all drives are listed as sd(a,b,c) rather than hd(a,b,c). Also, 7.0 caused me no end of trouble when used in a system mixing SATA and PATA drives.

In my case, I swapped the last two PATA drives for SATA, but since I had switched to PCLOS in the meantime, I can't say if it resolves the issue or not. I still have PATA DVDs on the secondary IDE, but now the primary IDE is empty.

[EDIT] You may find this link interesting...http://mepislovers.org/forums/showthread.php?t=14878&page=2

[disturbed1]

I believe in Mepis (since 7.0) all drives are listed as sd(a,b,c) rather than hd(a,b,c). Also, 7.0 caused me no end of trouble when used in a system mixing SATA and PATA drives.

Depends on the chipset. Most Intel chipsets, even back to 440bx are now listed as sd* devices because of the Piix+ kernel driver. I have an nVidia chipset that is still hd* using the same kernel. Some time during kernel 2.6.x they merged the intel drivers and scsi drivers. This initially caused problems to no end, until the driver matured after a few versions. I have another nVidia motherboard that uses hd* for the IDE devices, and sd* for the built in sata drives. Even stranger is my intel 850 board with 2 regular IDE ports + 2 IDE raid ports + a promise IDE ATA 2 port controler. 6 IDE ports, and it's a mix and match. I haven't looked for a while, but I'm positive the built in is sd* and promise controller is hd*, forget what the raid is.

Ubuntu 7.10 does the same thing with my newish Intel socket 775, all ide and sata are sd*, still keeps the promise IDE controller as hd*.

[tekkieman]

The chipset on my "problem" system is nVidia. All devices were listed as sd*. I run 7.0 on my HP laptop, and the single drive is sda. I couldn't tell you the chipset on that at the moment. I'm surprised the laptop even works considering it has almost every piece of incompatible hardware known to linux (ATI m200 graphics, Broadcom chipset for wireless, card reader)

In the post I linked above, it mentions that the ide/sata issue is pretty well known, but the "fix" in Mepis probably won't arrive until 7.5. There are workarounds, but nothing available from the dev for a while.

[kenmo]

I also re-formated by ide and sata drive, reinstalling Mepis onto the sata drive but had the same problem. However would boot fine IF I disabled the ide.

I was able to resolve my problem by editing the menu.lst in grub as well as the device.map file in /boot/grub.

I'm at work now but I swapped sdb and sdb as well as hd0,0 and hd1,0
device.map file in /boot/grub.

Rebooted and bingo it worked... Now Mepis is installed on sata (\ and \home partitions) and ide is formated as reiserfs (\DATA)...

Cheers

[disturbed1]

Damn did I get this wrong

[GMaq]

Hi,
Sorry to jump on the thread here but I have a very curious issue with the MEPIS installer CD that may be related. I have a MSI K9AG-Neo2-Digital mobo w/AMD chipsets and onboard ATI x1250 Radeon Video. I have it set up with the DVDROM and 1 IDE drive on the IDE channel, and 2 SATA drives set up RAID on the SATA channels. I currently use Ubuntu 7.10 64bit and it is truly great, I wanted to run MEPIS also and recently someone at Mepislovers was kind enough to roll a realtime kernel for me which has been a MEPIS weakness in the past for my purposes. So I download the custom kernel and modules, whip out my (confirmed good with other systems) MEPIS 7.0 CD and it errors out with a cannot find MEPIS filesystem error. It won't even run Live! Ubuntu,SiduX and other Live CD's run perfectly and I did a Sidux install which ran fine with the current config.

-DL'd and burned a fresh ISO
-the disk is good, it runs live on other systems
-I changed the bios from RAID to IDE
-I tried a different DVDROM and a USB DVDROM
-I used vesa,fromiso and failsafe modes
-AntiX live CD's also fail with the same error

Any ideas? Thanks.

I feel bad that someone went to all this work at my request and I'm not able to use it.

[tekkieman]

GMaq - If the RAID is just storage, have you tried disconnecting the drives during the install (or LiveCD boot)?

[GMaq]

Hey Tekkie! Very nice to see your avatar around here again!

Well I kinda set things up back-asswards in that I originally only had the SATA drives and a DVDROM, I installed XP first, then Ubuntu on the first SATA drive. I had another 80GB IDE drive laying around so I added it to the mix on the IDE channel with the DVDROM.

Windows sees the IDE drive as drive F: (after the DVDROM)
Ubuntu calls it hda1 and GRUB sees it as (hd1,X). It's weird though when I update my kernel Ubuntu likes to change GRUB look for the kernel at (hd1,0) instead of the SATA drive (hd0,X). But of course that is easily fixed in the menu.lst.

I will take your advice and take the SATA drives out of the equation and see what happens, It just strikes me as weird that other LiveCD's don't mind the drive configuration as is.

How do you like PCLOS? I kicked the tires on it a couple of times but it didn't offer some of the multimedia goodies I was looking for, It's consistent placement at position 1 or 2 at Distrowatch must mean something though!

[tekkieman]

How do you like PCLOS? I kicked the tires on it a couple of times but it didn't offer some of the multimedia goodies I was looking for, It's consistent placement at position 1 or 2 at Distrowatch must mean something though!

For a RPM-based distro, I really enjoy it. It uses synaptic just like the deb distros, and I haven't had a single dependency issue yet! All of the multimedia apps I use are in the repos, but I know you experiment with many that I'm probably not even aware of.

I've been using the 2008 MiniMe, primarily because it installs in about 3 minutes, and is pretty well stripped of apps. I install just what I use, and do an almost single-click remaster. Then I know all my installs will be the same, and ready to go when it boots.

I also was impressed with the configuration tools. I use a dual monitor setup, with a 17" 4:3 and a 19" 16:10, obviously with different resolutions. PCLOS config tools allowed me to set them up with the different resolutions, as well as different wallpaper without ever touching the xorg file. That was pretty impressive in itself.

While I have never had a single issue with it, in the end, it's still RPM based, and I just somehow feel dirty knowing that.

(Mind you, Mepis is still my favorite, and holds its place of honor on my laptop)

[kenmo]

I re-formated by ide and sata drive, reinstalling Mepis onto the sata drive but had the same problem. However would boot fine IF I disabled the ide.

I was able to resolve my problem by editing the menu.lst in grub as well as the device.map file in /boot/grub.

Rebooted and bingo it worked... Now Mepis is installed on sata (\ and \home partitions) and ide is formated as reiserfs (\DATA)...

Cheers
to forum

[GMaq]

kenmo,

Glad you got it to work, hopefully this issue as well as the LiveCD will be addressed in the next release.

@tekkieman,

Now your dirty little RPM secret is out, (hopefully Warren isn't following this thread!)

I played around with openSUSE for a while and in my experience there was no problem with the .rpm packages it was the god-awful YAST handling system. Synaptic and rpm sounds like a pretty good setup to me. Apparently Gentoo looked very seriously at going to an rpm based system, but in their words "since there were so few distributions left using RPM they have decided to wait for them to adopt their ebuild system" (Paraphrased).
I don't think that'll be happening anytime soon!