Suse Will Not Boot Without Install Dvd In The Drive

[snowcrashv5]

This is a long story but i'll attempt to make it as concise as possible.

First lets start with a Fedora Installation going horribly wrong:

• I have 3 drives, 1 SATA(sda1, sda2), 2 PATA/IDE (sdb1, sdc1)
• I moved a large amount of info off of sdb1 to sda2 and sdc1 (about 100MB)
• I wiped the drive, deleted the partition for sdb1 as I want to encrypt this disc with LUKs.
• While I was away I had a power outage and the computer would no longer boot
• As this has happened many times in the past with power outages, and as i saw some bad superblocks, i figured like normal there was something screwy with LVM
• I repaired the superblocks and file system, and recovered my data and got it to other drives, but i was still unable to boot.
• Finally it hit me. the MBR was on sdb and i wiped it when i deleted the partition and reformatted the disc.
• So i do a number of reinstalls of Fedore without LVM and i install them to SDA (the SATA drive), the boot up fine, but going through steps i've done on at least 10-20 different installs with fedora and other distro's i was not able to get codecs for anything to work. I'm not new to linux and couldn't for the life of me figure out why.
• As my fedora issues wore on throughout the last 2 weeks, I gave up on fedora. Since i've built this machine in January (and hard-ware wise it really is my pride and joy), i've tried Fedora 8 in which i had horrendous problems with their implementation of PulseAudio, i tried F7 64bit and realized 64bit doesn't suit my needs good enough, and finally F7 until my problem started above
• So i install Suse, and here's where my problems with Suse begins. The install for Suse requested which drive i wanted to install suse on, except now SDC was listed as my SATA drive. I shrug and install it there. SDA and SDB are not my PATA/IDE drives. The install went flawlessly...sort of.
• First thing i notice upon mounting SDB1 is that this is a 200GB drive, due to data loss with Fedora installs, there was no data on it. Yet dolphin stated I only had 90MB free.
• I take a look at it in Gparted and it shows the drive and doesn't show any used space. It's mounted where i told fstab to mount it. fdisk stated it has a /boot1 partition on it, again i figured this was left over by Fedora. I wipe the drive, delete the partition, create a new one, format it as ext3 and carry on.
• Finally today, was the first time i rebooted without the openSuse 10.3 disc in the machine and it takes me directly to a grub prompt. It will not go any further than that.
• If i put the install cd back in and when it boots i tell it to boot from the hard-disk, the OS comes right up as it should

If anyone can help out i'd love some advice, this is driving me nuts that i can't seem to get a single OS to install properly.

I've checked my BIOS and my boot order is set to boot the dvd-rw first, hard-disk second. I've checked the order of hard-drives and set the sata to be first. Yet Suse see's it as SDC and of course now, i can't boot without the cd.

I have this irking feeling that i shouldn't really be blaming any particular OS, but the SATA drive. This was introduced 2 weeks ago because i usually keep an OS drive and 2 data drives, my original OS drive (80GB IDE) died on me, my backup was a 10GB IDE drive which was slow, loud, and didn't leave much room on the drive for all the software i want. So i decided an 80GB Sata drive would be the key. Since then my machine, no matter what, will not work correctly and I've already lost about 50GB in movies (dvd-backups, youtube rips, and various other films).

it's a shame that almost everytime i install the os, i get most my applications installed and tweaked, the DE tweaked and themed as i want, before i start noticing a problem i have no idea how to fix.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Jonathan183]

Sounds like you have been having fun ...
Suggest as an initial step you check BIOS options to ensure any delays to allow drive startup are set on/enabled. If the problem is still present then it would probably be useful to boot from hard drive when you have the DVD in and post
output of

fdisk -l

from YAST the contents of

/boot/grub/menu.lst
/boot/grub/device.map
/etc/grub.conf

and double check boot loader installation options have default installation
boot from MBR, and set active flag in partition table for boot partition is selected.

[snowcrashv5]

Sounds like you have been having fun ...
Suggest as an initial step you check BIOS options to ensure any delays to allow drive startup are set on/enabled. If the problem is still present then it would probably be useful to boot from hard drive when you have the DVD in and post
output of

fdisk -l

from YAST the contents of

/boot/grub/menu.lst
/boot/grub/device.map
/etc/grub.conf

and double check boot loader installation options have default installation
boot from MBR, and set active flag in partition table for boot partition is selected.

/etc/grub.conf

setup --stage2=/boot/grub/stage2 (hd0) (hd2,0)
setup --stage2=/boot/grub/stage2 (hd2,0) (hd2,0)
quit

/boot/grub/device.map

(hd0)   /dev/sda
(hd2)   /dev/sdc
(hd1)   /dev/sdb

/etc/fstab/

/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_WDC_WD800JD-55M_WD-WMAMD8213721-part1 /boot                ext3       acl,user_xattr        1 2
/dev/system/root     /                    ext3       acl,user_xattr        1 1
/dev/system/swap     swap                 swap       defaults              0 0
proc                 /proc                proc       defaults              0 0
sysfs                /sys                 sysfs      noauto                0 0
debugfs              /sys/kernel/debug    debugfs    noauto                0 0
usbfs                /proc/bus/usb        usbfs      noauto                0 0
devpts               /dev/pts             devpts     mode=0620,gid=5       0 0
/dev/sda1           /home/gnuisancev3/Docs2/ ext3    defaults              0 0
/dev/sdb1           /home/gnuisancev3/Docs/ ext3     defaults              0 0

 /boot/grub/menu.lst


# Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Wed Feb 13 08:50:59 EST 2008
default 0
timeout 8
gfxmenu (hd2,0)/message
##YaST - activate

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title openSUSE 10.3 - 2.6.22.17-0.1
    root (hd2,0)
    kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.22.17-0.1-default root=/dev/system/root vga=0x31a resume=/dev/system/swap splash=silent showopts
    initrd /initrd-2.6.22.17-0.1-default

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: failsafe###
title Failsafe -- openSUSE 10.3 - 2.6.22.17-0.1
    root (hd2,0)
    kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.22.17-0.1-default root=/dev/system/root vga=normal showopts ide=nodma apm=off acpi=off noresume nosmp noapic maxcpus=0 edd=off 3
    initrd /initrd-2.6.22.17-0.1-default

 fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24321 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0005e0b6

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1       24321   195358401   83  Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 203.9 GB, 203928109056 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24792 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000d90af

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *           1       24792   199141708+  83  Linux

Disk /dev/sdc: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00042d6f

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1   *           1           9       72261   83  Linux
/dev/sdc2              10        9729    78075900   8e  Linux LVM

Disk /dev/dm-0: 21.4 GB, 21474836480 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2610 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/dm-0 doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/dm-1: 2147 MB, 2147483648 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 261 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/dm-1 doesn't contain a valid partition table

[Jonathan183]

OK it looks as though you have used LVM and have installed SUSE to an 80GB drive. Boot partition /dev/sdc1.
Suggest you shutdown linux, remove the DVD and reboot the system. At the grub prompt type
find /boot/grub/stage1
you should get a result something like ... this

grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
find /boot/grub/stage1
 (hd0,5)
grub>

But you should get a response of (hd2,0). Check you get this.

[Pinguin]

I had this problem once or twice in the past. Your bootloader probably isn't installed or isn't installed right. I'd use the rescue option on the Suse DVD to reinstall the bootloader. That's what worked for me a few months ago.