boot error

[duval_jay]

I've been trying all day to get this removable HDD that i use at school to work in my computer at home.

I get this error when I try to boot: Fedora 10 begins to load and it gets about half way then this happens:

Could not detect stabilization, waiting 10 seconds.

Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while...

Volume group "main" not found

Unable to access resume device (/dev/main/swap)
mount: error mounting /dev/root on /sysroot as ext3: No such file or directory

It works fine at school, I have not changed anything since than. I thought maybe it was a grub problem but I'm not sure if it is. I used SuperGrubDisk to try and restore it if there was a problem but it didn't change anything.

Here's what my grub.conf file looks like:

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
# root (hd0,0)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/main/root
# initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
password --md5 $1$UQiAu$V2TwNdHKpAn1Rnxhj4w8A0
hiddenmenu
title Fedora (2.6.27.15-170.2.24.fc10.i686)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.27.15-170.2.24.fc10.i686 ro root=/dev/main/root rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.27.15-170.2.24.fc10.i686.img
title Fedora (2.6.27.12-170.2.5.fc10.i686)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.27.12-170.2.5.fc10.i686 ro root=/dev/main/root rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.27.12-170.2.5.fc10.i686.img
title Fedora (2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686 ro root=UUID=8594efde-d695-4261-9b50-fa11a6886b73 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img

As you can see there are 3 entries at the grub screen. The first 2 only are seen at school, then at home I see a third in addition to the first 2.

When I type "geometry (hd0)" at the grub command line I get this:

Drive 0x80: C/H/S = 1023/255/63, The number of sectors = 488397168, LBA
Parition num: 0, Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
Parition num: 4, Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
Parition num: 5, Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x8e
Parition num: 6, Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83

When I type "geometry (hd1)" (which is vista x64 business) I get this:

Drive 0x81: C/H/S = 1023/240/63, The number of sectors = 976773168, LBA
Partition num: 0, Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7

Does anyone know what the problem is and if I can fix it? I want to work with my HDD at home because I don't have school all week and I need to work on an assignment.

By the way I have a fedora 10 live cd and the fedora 10 installation dvd in case there's a way to fix this with either of those. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[yancek]

How do you use it at school? Do you have a laptop of your won you attach it to? To you attach it to the school computers? What's on the desktop you have at home? Do you have other operating systems on it? If so, what are they?

The partitions shown from Grub are three Linux (0x83), one LVM (0x8e) on (hd0) and your vista on (hd1). It would help if we knew what was on these partitions, if you could answer the above questions.

[duval_jay]

Thx for your reply man,

At school our computers have a switch where there's an external and internal switch. Internal is a switch for the hard drive in the computer that has a linux, vista and xp installation. The external switch is for when we use our removable HDD. It then automatically boots the removable hard drive.

The partitions on (hd0) consist of 2 primarys, a logical (i think) and a primary (which is active). I'm really not sure which is which...

Is it possible my problem is initrd related? (i heard this in another thread - i know nothing about initrd btw lol)


edit: no laptop is involved

[yancek]

I don't really understand how your are "trying to use the external drive on your home computer"? Do you have an internal drive on your home computer with an Operating System on it? Are you trying to install (or do you have installed) Fedora on your external hard drive?

Do you see the three Fedora entries you have listed in your menu.lst from an earlier post when you try to boot? If you do, try selecting the third one at boot. You've got LVM and you have three partitions, what are they? Can you use your Live CD to post output of "fdisk -l" run as root?