I am writing this via Knoppix. Great thing that! Now, to the problem.
I have a dual boot system with Windows 2000 and Red Hat Linux 9.0. Last
night, after playing some games with my kids and burning CDs on a borrowed
USB burner, Linux froze solid. All I got was the caps-lock and scroll-lock
keyboard LEDs blinking in unison. I had to power down.
The hard drive is 20GB setup like this:
hda1=FAT32 Windows 2000 ~ 6GB
hda2=EXT3 /boot ~ 500MB
hda3=EXT3 / ~ 12GB
hda4=SWAP ~ the rest
I have setup the dual boot according to these instructions
http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux/grub-w2k-HOWTO.html. This puts GRUB on
the first sector of the /boot partition and enters the LInux boot block as an
entry for the Windows 2000 boot loader. It has been working fine. When it
works right, this is what happens:
1-Windows 2000 boot loader asks for the OS. I choose Linux.
2-The GRUB boot loader text flashes in the upper left corner of the screen for
a moment and then the GRUB menu comes up.
3-I select the kernel I want to boot and up it comes.
After the disaster above, when I select Linux at step 1, I can see the word
GRUB start to print in the upper left but then the computer reboots!
So far I have discovered:
- The drive is removable and inserting another 20GB drive with Windows 98 and
Linux will boot either just fine so I don't think the system hardware is to
blame.
- The Windows 2000 partition on the problem drive boots up and runs fine.
- Booting from the Red Hat 9.0 install CD in rescue mode allows me to get to
the partitions. "fsck -t ext3 -r /dev/hda2" and on hda3 complete very
quickly and report no errors.
- The /dev/hda3/etc/grub.conf file looks fine.
I think I need to re-install GRUB back on the first sector of /boot
(/dev/hda2) but I don't know how. I have all of Knoppix at my disposal but I
need some direction on how to proceed. Any helps out there?
Alan
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