Loading GRUB With 'Error 17', Need Help Badly

[abhijeetw]

Hi guys,

I installed fedora core 5 in my second hard disk (hdb1 linux and hdb2 linux LVM) with grub in that disk in order to leave the MBR in the first disk (windows XP, one primary partition, and three logical partitions) primary master untouched. I changed the boot sequence in bios in order to be able to boot from second drive using grub.

At first, I couldn’t load grub (the screen would freeze at start-up), so I just booted from the rescue cd and reinstalled grub. This time, the grub menu appeared but couldn’t boot into any of the two OS. I figured to fix the problem for windows by adding couple of lines in grub.conf file to remap device order. Now I could boot to windows. But I am still working to get Fedora booting, where it posts the same on the screen:

esprit

Hi,
I too encountered Grub Error 17 and 13, on my PC which has Windowx XP on one HDD and Fedora 7 on the other. The issue got resolved, by doing the following.

Configuration
=========
SATA - Windows XP (hd0)
PATA - Fedora Core 7 (hd1)
Changed BIOS Settings (or it got changed) when I removed 1 SATA Drive. Restored to original configuration and tried to restore the BIOS Settings

After this I got Grub Error 17 and 13.

Booting Failure on Grub Menu
=============================
1] When Booting 'Other'

rootnoverify (hd0,0)
Chainloader +1

Error 13: Invalid or unsupported executable format
Press any key.

2] When Booting FC 7

root (hd1,0)
Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7 ro root=/dev/Volgroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet mem=796M

3] Partitions D and E disappeared on Widowx XP (later)



Findings
======
1] Type c, to go the grub command line. type i to get info on the commands being executed.
Find out the detailed commands being executed.

2] The "booting problem" (Error 17 and 13), as I discovered, was due to swap of hd0 and hd1, during hard disc connect / disconnects.

This might have happened automatically as well. The Grub loaded on PATA, has certain settings (from /boot/grub/menu.lst) . But there is no way to modify menu.lst. One cannot modify without entering Linux. For that try to first uderstand and fix the issue on the grub command line.

3] Grub Command line. Execute following commands
grub> map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
unhide (hd1,0)
hide (hd1,1)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1
makeactive
boot.

WINDOWS XP BOOTED FINE !!!!!! BUT NO D: AND E: partitions !!

4] How do to the above setting permanently. Linux is not booting. For booting linux, do the following on grub

grup> swap drives (hd0 and hd1)
grub> kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7 ro root=/dev/Volgroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet mem=796M
grub> initrd /initrd-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7.img (THIS IS FROM setp [1])
grub> boot

LINUX BOOTED FINE !!!!!!!. Now one can modify the menu.lst file.

5] Modification of menu.lst file.

# change hd0 to hd1 everywhere.
# Windows section should look as follows
title Windows XP
root (hd1,0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
map x y
map y x
chainloader +1

BOOTING RESOTRED AS BEFORE !! BOTH WINDOWS AND LINUX BOOT fine from Grub.

6] What happened to D: and E: Partition of Windows XP Drive

Go back to Grub
do the following

grub> map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
unhide (hd1,0)
unhide (hd1,2)
unhide (hd1,3)
unhide (hd1,4)
hide (hd1,1)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1
makeactive
boot

This restored the D: ad E: partitions on the Windowx XP Drive.


Hope this helps,
Abhijeet Wakle
Sigpro Systems