Installed Gentoo.. Artifacts on boot

[JimRune]

So I've partitioned an entire 250GB hard drive to install Gentoo Linux on.. Installation went smoothly, however booting wasn't.

On my attempt to boot into Gentoo, I got a bunch of artifacts on the screen. Some of them were blinking, which indicated to me that I was in a text prompt. So I hit enter, and it took me to a black screen with white lines evenly spaced down the screen, but there was text on there that said Grub failed to boot because of "Error 17 : Cannot mount selected partition".

I'm installing Gentoo from the LiveCD and I've no clue how to navigate it so I can access the grub.conf file on the hard drive to make sure it's good. I formatted the drive and am reinstalling Gentoo right now just to make sure everything went over fine.

So, has anyone ever heard of this happening before? Google yields no relevant results, unfortunately.

EDIT: Alright, I'm fairly certain I've figured out what the problem is. Both hard drives I'm using are SATA and thus do not need to be designated master or slave. However, when I installed GRUB to the MBR, it wanted to be able to distinguish the drives in this manner and since it was unable to, I was unable to boot Gentoo and also not able to boot Windows. FIXMBR command in the Recovery console yielded no results (neither did fixboot). I re-wrote the grub.conf file several times (Had to navigate using the console and use nano in order to actually save the file) but that was to no avail as well.

So I'm just going to have to wipe my Windows install (I've backed up everything already) and start from scratch. Next time I won't install GRUB to the Master Boot Record, if it can be avoided (which I really hope it can). I can use NTLDR, right?

Also, can I use Lilo instead of GRUB? I'm on an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ and when I'm using the GUI installer for Gentoo, it says that I have no choice but to use Grub because of my processor. Is that correct? I'd really like to avoid using Grub for the time being...

[flashingcurser]

You can use lilo, I use it when I need a /boot partition. There are instructions on the gentoo site. ntldr is very clunky, if I recall you still have to have another bootloader on the other partition to use this.

My gut reaction is that the display settings in grub were set up wrong. I usually don't even bother any more, console fonts are fine for me when booting. This could happen with any boot loader. If you have trouble again post your lilo.conf or grub.list. You should be able to edit it from the gentoo live cd. You would just have to mount partitions and chroot, then edit.




dan

oh, and I forgot, having lilo or grub in your mbr is much nicer.

[flashingcurser]

One more thing, I personally have had very little luck with the recovery console in fixing mbr problems. Oddly, win98 boot disk then running the: FDISK /mbr
I seem to have better luck with.

Edit: though I have not tried this with sata drives.

[JimRune]

I agree that the settings in grub were wrong.. I just don't know what to change them to.

Also, is there anything I have to add to Windows boot.ini file in order to recognize Gentoo?

[KarmaKiller]

I had the same thing happen to me....But before it did the "error 17", the last time i started it up it did a kernal panic. I have no idea what went wrong so i wiped it and started again. The second time was a breeze with no issues...Still don't understand it, but it's all good now.

[JimRune]

Okay, I'm back. I want to try installing Gentoo again, but I'm wary.

ntldr is very clunky, if I recall you still have to have another bootloader on the other partition to use this.

You mean, another boot loader on the Windows partition? Do you have one to recommend?

Also, will installing Gentoo via command line instead of GUI be easier? And how do I properly chroot? I've never done that before.

[sincityharley]

I am also having the same issue except my error is:

Booting "Gentoo Linux 2.6.24-r8'

root (hd0,0)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
kernel /boot/kernel-2.6.24-gentoo-r8 root=/dev/hda3

Error 15: File not found

Press any key to continue...

I also have the white lines. I cant really read through them. Can anyone tell me how to edit my display settings in grub to get rid of the white lines? I am very new to Gentoo so please be gentle.

[CMonster]

I'm just wondering if this isn't a case where GRUB needed the map parameter. Most likely Windows was still there and intact but there could have been some confusion between hd0 and hd1.

anyway do let us know how things turn out