GRUB boot loader / Debian Lenny / GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB

[Alex Beamish]

Hi folks,

Last week I set up an NFS server on an old P400 box, using a pair of
320G drives and an old 8G drive as the system drive. Lenny installed,
and I successfully ran mdadm on the big drives and then mkfs to build
a file system on them. I mounted the mirrored drives, made an /export
directory, set up /etc/exports to export a directory and mounted that
directory from my workstation -- everything worked fine (if a little
slowly). Life was good.

On Friday, there was a power cut, and now when the system boots I
don't get the GRUB menu, I get screenfuls of GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB going
on forever (I had the same problem when trying to install
DmanSmallLinux -- I gave up on that and moved to Lenny, which worked
better). This GRUB GRUB GRUB is tiring and not really that
informative.

I've talked with folks on #grub and received the advice to 'just
install GRUB2' using a chroot jail. I could do that, I suppose, but
I'd prefer to understand a) what's going on (that is, what error
condition is GRUB GRUB GRUB reporting?); and b) why GRUB2 will make
this problem go away. The current version of GRUB is 0.97.

Drives are: primary IDE: 320G / CD; secondary IDE: 8G / 320G, so the
8G system drive is known by the BIOS as D:, and by GRUB as /dev/hdc.
The device.map is (hd0)  /dev/hda / (hd1) /dev/hdc / (hd2)  /dev/hdd;
and menu.lst contains a regular and a single user entry with root /
(hd1,0). I tried changing the root entry to (hd1,1) since I thought
Linux was on the second partition, but it's not.

I just wish there was some way I could find out what error GRUB is
encountering so that I could address it. Thoughts?

Thanks,

-- 
Alex Beamish
Toronto, Ontario
aka talexb
--
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