Try (hd0,0) EXT2... pls help

C

chrisit

Member
Hi all, love what you have done!

I have been using this for a little while now in a setup with 3 partitions.

sda1 (EXT3), sda2 (NTFS-XP), sda3 (NTFS-Vista)

Auto boot is set to XP
sda2 has BOOT flag
Timer in Vista set to 1 second so I never get to see the menu unless I F8
ALL GOOD!

Now, I have just did the same on a new pc. A Dell Vostro 200.
The difference this time, I set RAID in the BIOS instead of IDE for proper SATA support(NCQ,etc..) All goes well, everything is installed in order of the partitions... now when I'm done with vista and install EasyBCD and set NeoGrub, renamed it, when back in XP to manually copy menu.lst I had already setup before. The path is c:/NST.

When I get to the Vista loader menu, I choose Neogrub and I get :

Try (hd0,0) : EXT2 :

What does this mean? Just to make sure I didnt have issues with this computers BIOS, I took the other hard drive I know works with it. It does. I double checked my menu.lst file and it's the same as the one on the other PC. Like this:
title Go back to windows
root (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1

title Whatever
root (hd0,0)

I've removed a bit of details from it but you get whats needed. The only thing that I know is different is the files on the drives. See because when I first achieved this I had tried first with grub4dos and didnt succeed, only then I used NeoGrub and it worked right away.

Differences on sda1: I have a map file on the old pc and not on the new one. Have no idea how it got there I somply cannot remember.

Differences on sda2: root of my c: drive in XP has a file grldr.mbr on old drive but not the new one... this might have been from expreimenting with grub4dos... even thought if I copy this file it's still a no go.

Please try to help me out. I have not read all documentation but am pretty comfortable playing with this only this time I'm out of ideas. I have searched for Try (hd0,0) without success... to many possible errors. I'm sure you guys will ask the question so i'll be proactive, my linux partition is not an install nor did it ever had gryb installed. I just copied a kernel file and initrd.gz.
 
The try message should only be on the screen for a brief period of time if all is going well. It is just grub looking over each disk/partition to find the boot files it is looking for.
 
ok, thanks for your answer! So then it means it just hangs without any error messages...:x
I hope there's some test I can do because I really have no idea. Could my partition table be messed up? When I received it obviously it had the dell recovery I just deleted all partitions and created the 3 I mentionned using gparted. Now i'm out of idea...

What the heck could it be?
 
Well if its hanging than there's a problem. Anytime i've seen this message it has been only briefly until it found the correct location for the boot files.

I would setup neogrub in the automatic configuration. You can do this by uninstalling it on the neogrub tab in Add/Remove entries in EasyBCD, deleting the old entry for it, and adding the new entry pointing it to your Linux partition.
 
So there is no indication of what could cause it to freeze at 'Try (hd0,0) EXT2'?

It's a new pc we received from dell... should I try to reformat it with different partition sizes?

Like I said the only difference in the EXT3 part from another drive is the map file. I didnt even know i had put that in there, could it have anything to do with it?
 
It's quite possible that NeoGrub doesn't support your RAID configuration.

My advice: press 'c' at the NeoGrub prompt to enter the command line. Once there, use a combination of the 'root' 'find' and 'cat' commands to pin the problem.

Root can be used to pick the drive/partition. Find will see if NeoGrub can find/see the file in question, and 'cat' can be used to view the contents of text files.
 
Computer Guru said:
It's quite possible that NeoGrub doesn't support your RAID configuration.
.
Click to expand...
Well its not a real raid, its the bios settings IDE/RAID.
As far as I know all this does is enables NCQ and hotswap.
No raid array are actually created and also I did put another SATA drive from another PC using IDE mode and that worked (for the NeoGrub part) even though the bios was set to raid mode.

I am zeroing the drive right now, just to make sure because I've had wierd issues from brand new dells, i really don't see what they could have done but maybe the way they put their recovery part prevents you from using it properly under linux?

Anyone?
 
Well thats it, some motherboard call it RAID instead of AHCI.

Addendum:

I have put it in IDE mode, zero'd the drive, partitioned, installed xp and vista. Still same thing. I don't get it.

What is going on?
 
Last edited:
chrisit said:
I'm sure you guys will ask the question so i'll be proactive, my linux partition is not an install nor did it ever had gryb installed. I just copied a kernel file and initrd.gz.
Click to expand...

Perhaps the version of Linux you want to use needs to be properly installed?...
Have you tried "root (hd1,0)" in your menu.lst file?
 
kairozamorro said:
Perhaps the version of Linux you want to use needs to be properly installed?...
Have you tried "root (hd1,0)" in your menu.lst file?
Click to expand...

Well I have tried that, it doesnt work. I was thinking this message comes from NeoGrub.mbr, if I open the file in a notepad I see the actual line. What makes it stuck there though? I have the exact same settings than another install on a HP kit. Is it the Dell software that prevents this to work properly? Could it be the hard drive? I am short on time on this thing and already spend too much time trying to make it work so if you guys can help me with this it would be greatly appreciated, I know you are already helping me, but there's got to be something that triggers this message that you know about...

Let me try to explain in a bit more details what I'm doing here.
I wiped the drive then created partition 1 EXT3, part2 and part 3 NTFS using Gparted. Then on my EXT3 part all I need is a initrd.gz and a kernel file. This is from PING (partimage is not ghost). Then in 2nd part i install XP and part 3 Vista. Then Neogrub from Vista and change the settings in menu.lst to reflect what I need to be able to boot in linux as follows:

title Go back to windows
root (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1
title Restore XP
root (hd0,0)
kernel /kernel pxe init=/linuxrc root=/dev/ram0 rw noapic nolapic lba devfs=nomount ramdisk_size=33000 load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0 Replace_BIOS=N After_Completion=Reboot Force_Dirty_NTFS_Mount=Y AUTO=Y Restore_Only=Y Server=/dev/sda1 Directory=/ Image_To_Restore=image
initrd /initrd.gz

title Restore Vista
root (hd0,0)
kernel /kernel pxe init=/linuxrc root=/dev/ram0 rw noapic nolapic lba devfs=nomount ramdisk_size=33000 load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0 Replace_BIOS=N After_Completion=Reboot Force_Dirty_NTFS_Mount=Y AUTO=Y Restore_Only=Y Server=/dev/sda1 Directory=/ Image_To_Restore=imagevista
initrd /initrd.gz



These exact same settings works on the other HP kit and what I did to make sure it was not a matter of the partitions being different is I took the hard drive from the HP and put it in the Dell Vostro 200 and it works! But now I'm trying to rebuild/recreate this from scratch on the Dell and it fails! So it's got to be either the hard drive that has an issue, or the Dell Windows disc I used. I hear Dell uses some propriatory MBR and or Boot record so I dunno, does it make sense? Please please help me out here as I'm starting to look like a nubcake in front of my boss!:S
 
Alright... before Windows is installed are you able to boot PING? Are you sure PING only relies on the kernel/initrd.gz? Can you get PING booting by installing grub to its partition using super-grub or another linux disc?

Let's say Windows is installed and working. If you've got PING booting without the need of Vista's bootmgr and EasyBCD that is the first step. Download a copy of unetbootin and use PING's .iso file to install it to the hard drive for this. You don't need to specify any other options other than the .iso file and the partition you wish to install it to. Open disk management and set PING's partition as active. Reboot and verify that it boots PING and than repair Vista's bootloader using a recovery disc or Vista DVD and startup repair. Once back in Vista, open EasyBCD and uninstall NeoGrub. Re-add a new entry pointing to PINGs partition and check "grub is not installed to mbr" before adding it. Reboot and test the entry.
 
Yes Ping relies only on these 2 files and it is working using Lilo and using NeoGrub but on a different PC. Now I'm doing the same thing but on a new Dell Vostro 200 which uses a chipset that is not handled the same as previous Intel chipsets. I'm also reading it could a BIOS Bug, but like I said before, I took the hard drive from the HP kit which I was doing the same test on and it worked. I am glad that you are trying to help me, if I understand correctly, the Try (hd0,0) error is prior the load of my menu.lst file. So this means there is a problem reading my menu.lst file or the grldr one? I am pretty sure this is where I need to put efforts in.
 
Sample grub entry assuming PING is on /dev/sda1:

Code: 
title PING
root (hd0,0) 
kernel /kernel
initrd /initrd.gz

If you're unsure about parameters and whatnot and the above entry doesn't work, use unetbootin like I proposed. Assuming you can get PING booting after the install, you can go into /syslinux/syslinux.cfg to get the boot data you need, though you'll need to modify it and put it in your menu.lst for grub to understand. Post the syslinux.cfg you get from that and I'll modify it to work with grub for you. Might I suggest you also use FAT32 for the filesystem instead of Ext2fs. Tends to work better and you can access syslinux.cfg from within Windows this way.
 
Ok, I have finally changed the fs from ext3 to fat32 and it works...

Now what I dont understand is how I got it to work before using the same version of easybcd and the same version of ping? Prior to using easybcd I had installed lilo, it created map files, could this be why it worked using an ext3 part? What would you think could make it work using ext3? There must be something missing... in gparted I can add a flag maybe, like lba?

I'm glad this works now, but wonder why ext3 is a problem? Is this a grub4dos problem?

Actually I have just read that grldr form frub4dos 0.4.4 fixes an issue with ext3 256 byte inodes size.... is this it?
 
Last edited:
That's possible, but I'm not sure if that had been your problem. We'll be bringing NeoGrub up to date with the latest Grub4Dos codebase with the next release.
 
Is there any beta i could try? I'm in for testing at this point... or can I take anything from grub4dos 0.4.4 and overwrite someof neogrub files?
 
Back
Top