Grub Loading Stage 1.5 prompt

**squimmy** · 07-10-2005

i am SO close to throwing my comp out the window right now. GRUB didn't even work a week this time. it only showed me my boot menu twice before it decided to do its usual act of:

loading stage 1.5

and then taking me to its command prompt.

a working bootloader is the only thing holding me back from using linux (im using windows right now, i restored the windows mbr, the only mbr ive found which ALLWAYS works.)

seeing as i now cannot get into linux, is there any way i can use a different bootloader (apart from lilo)?i'm willing to pay some money for a commercial one as long as it works. if there are no other bootloaders ill have to settle for windows

i don't understand why the windows mbr allways allways allways works, yet i cannot get grub to even work for a week!

Help!

moderator note: title edited

**dylunio** · 07-10-2005

Firstly I'm sorry to hear you got this problem, makes me think it is a hardware thing due to the fact it's happened on both SuSE and Mepis.

If your bootloader gets to a command prompt all is not lost. I don't know the details of your settup, but if you have installed mepis on /dev/hda3 then the following should boot it:

Code:

grub> root &#40;hd0,2&#41;
grub> kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda2 
grub> boot

since grub has tab-complete you should be able to

Code:

grub> kernel /vm<tab>

and it should bring up the kernel /vmlinuz-2.6 or somthing.

Let me know how this goes, if it's not successful, we'll try another bootloader. THough I find it very strange that GRUB goes frob working to not working, is the naming of the drives dynamic or somthing? since I doubt you have been messing with your grub.conf file, it suggests the / partiton has changed it's name since grub was installed

**tstolber** · 07-10-2005

It does sound like it could be hardware related as it works sometimes but not others.

Could it perhaps be due to a bad / old / out of steam battery on the motherboard, when it goes down it resets the bios defaults?
Does it happen if you leave the comp for a while, as restarting soon after might still have some residual current left in the board?

Hope you get it sorted.

**squimmy** · 07-10-2005

well my setup is like this.

windows is on hda1 and hdb5 linux root partition is on hdb3. how would i reinstall grub from windows? i had to put the windows mbr back to be able to use the cpu at all.

when i was installing mepis, it gave me the choice of installing it on hda or hdb. should i try installing it on a different hd, or would that make no difference?

**dylunio** · 07-10-2005

If you want to reinstall grub look at http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/topic-224.html.

**squimmy** · 07-10-2005

lol that doesnt have instructions on reinstalling grub or anything. seeing as the windows boot loader allways works, is there any way i can edit boot.ini to give me the choice of which to edit?

**dylunio** · 07-10-2005

wrong link, try this one: http://www.linuxforums.org/tutorials...ial-19999.html

Too many FireFox tabs open

**squimmy** · 07-10-2005

i dont have a working floppy drive tho. im thinking about installing acronis os selector, it came with disk director which i bought to first partition my hard drive. maybe ill have more luck with that.

**dylunio** · 07-10-2005

Well tell us how it goes.

**squimmy** · 07-10-2005

as with everything bootloader related, it failed miserably. this was worst then grub, it didn't even detect linux. i'm having withdrawal symptons. i havent been in a linux for so long now!

why, why does the ghost of bootloaders haunt me????!?!?

Help please, i don;t want to have to live with windows for any longer!

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