Need Help with Grub

[Technomage]

  I would put a livecd into the drive and run fsck on the partition that 
has the problem (do not mount the partition). I don't remember what all 
the switches are (you may have to man those). it may find the trouble 
spot. if it doesn't, there is a pretty good chance that your kernel 
image got bollixed or the initrd needs to be rebuilt (corrupt?) or even 
one of the modules may have been corrupted.

the fsck will help you determine if the drive has a problem or not. 
depending on its output, you'll have a better idea what to do.

- Eric

On 8/10/10 2:01 PM, Mark Phillips wrote:
> OK, I can now boot the system. I fixed the menu.list to correspond to 
> the drives as they are installed today. However, I have now discovered 
> that I may have a bad spot on the drive.
>
> My first two entries in menu.list:
>
> title        Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.26-2-686
> root        (hd0,4)
> kernel        /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-2-686 root=/dev/hda5 ro
> initrd        /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-2-686
>
> title        Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.26-2-686 (recovery mode)
> root        (hd0,4)
> kernel        /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-2-686 root=/dev/hda5 ro single
> initrd        /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-2-686
>
> will not boot. I get the dreaded "Error 24 Attempt to access block 
> outside partition". But I can boot into the rest of the entries:
> title        Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.26-1-686
> root        (hd0,4)
> kernel        /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-686 root=/dev/hda5 ro
> initrd        /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-1-686
>
> title        Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.26-1-686 (recovery mode)
> root        (hd0,4)
> kernel        /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-686 root=/dev/hda5 ro single
> initrd        /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-1-686
>
> and so on.
>
> I forced a fsck on a reboot, and that I get the same error 24 when I 
> try to boo the first two entries in menu.lst, but I can still boot 
> into the other ones.
>
> Should I apt-get reinstall linux-image-2.6.26-2-686 (assumption: the 
> vmlinuz file is corrupted), or do something else more basic to repair 
> the drive (assumption: there is bad sector)?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Mark
>