GRUB Hard Disk Error

[TraXy]

Hello!

First off - yes, I'm a newbie. Yes, I've googled myself silly to find something that would work. Yes, I've contacted the resident Linux person among my friends and asked for help. He had a bunch of suggestions, none solved the it. Problem remains.

I have a Toshiba Libretto U100 notebook, tiny little thing, running on Intel® 855 chipset motherboard. IDE harddrive (as far as I'm aware). As I don't use it for a lot of things, I thought it would be excellent for me to install Linux on it and get used to it.

I installed SuSE 10 on it. It went fine, no problem with the install disc or anything, and I wiped the HDD clean of any partitions to start anew. In the end of the installation, it reboots to load Linux... and it just says GRUB Hard Disk Error, white on black. Nothing else.

So I tried a few other distros: Ubuntu 5, Kubuntu 6 and Mandriva 2006. The only one I got working was Mandriva, the other two had the exact same error as SuSE did.

Have tried booting off a live CD and used the terminal/console thing to troubleshoot, but alas, no. It seems the HDD is recognised in the system as /dev/hda1.

Some commands tried and the results:

root (hd0,6) : Error 21 "Selected disk does not exist". I've tried both hd1 and hd0 as well as hda1. I've also tried replacing the 6 for any number between 0 and 7.
root (hda1,6) : Error 23 "Error while parsing number"
find /boot/grub/stage1 : "no such file or directory" in normal console, error 15 File Not Found if the console was set to GRUB
mkdir kubuntu (was trying this in Kubuntu) then mount /dev/hda kubuntu and chroot ubuntu - now here's where it stopped working, because it would not use grub-install /dev/hda. It just gave me general help options when typing anything after grub-install.
Basically, everything listed in this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=24113 plus also using sudo before the commands whenever it said access denied.

Also tried repairing the SuSE installation, trying to get it to use another boot loader, but that didn't work either. Although I might've done it wrong, so I'll try again.

http://www.suselinuxsupport.de/wikka...kka=Gruberrors said this about error 21 "This error is returned if the device part of a device- or full file name refers to a disk or BIOS device that is not present or not recognized by the BIOS in the system". Yeah, a Toshiba BIOS doesn't exactly sport a lot of options...

Just one HDD, one unpartitioned space that any Linux distro has been free to put into its three little partitions, no Windows on it to look out for whatsoever. Sure, I could just give up and install Mandriva, as that worked fine (is it using LILO as default???), but I like SuSE, it's nice and simple for a n00b like me, and since I managed to finally get my desktop's Linux to play MP3s (not quite sure how), I would like to stick with it. It shouldn't be a compatibility problem, right? I should be able to get it working, if I can just get the GRUB thing to agree with the laptop.

PLEASE HELP!

[devils casper]

when you installed SuSe, did you change anything in Boot Loader section?
install SuSe 10 again. dont change anything in Boot Loader section. accept default partition structure.




casper

[TraXy]

Hi there! Thanks for the reply!

First time I tried, I didn't touch anything, except partitioning, as it was suggesting resizing the Windows partition, and I wanted to remove Windows altogether. After that, I've tried leaving stuff alone as well as fiddling with the controls.

It was weird now that I tried again, because even though I specifically now asked it to use LILO as boot loader, I still got "GRUB Hard Disk Error"... so I started installation again, but went for the repair options, and sure thing, LILO was selected, but I went with it again, it happily announced it had installed a boot loader, and on reboot... I actually got it working!

Now I just need to get to grips with getting the hardware configured and figuring out how wireless networking works in a non-Windows system!

But yay, it works!