Failed poor man's install with w32grub on NTFS

[baldyeti]

Hi; this really is a sequel to the "Poor Man's Install Not Working in version 7-26"
thread from the "general support" forum, which has gotten a tad longish.

I've downloaded garyng's patched grub for NTFS from
http://www.skyjammer.com/files/knoppix

I've tried to install and use it, but all I get is a an apparent hangup while
"GRUB Loading stage2 ..." is being displayed.

My disk setup is the following:

scsi sd0 holds[list:3cc16eb3b5]
C: 7gb NTFS
D: 9gb NTFS

scsi sd1 holds
E: 7gb NTFS
F: 4gb NTFS
X: 1gb fat32
Z: 100mb fat32
[/list:u:3cc16eb3b5]
The X: drive holds a copy of the clooped knoppix filesystem, which is found
without any problem when booting from diskette. I'd like to reuse this "poor
man's install" using w32grub instead of a floppy. I have unzipped gary's file
under C:\, then copied the vmlinuz and miniroot.gz from my boot floppy to
C:\boot and referred to these in an edited C:\boot\grub\menu.lst, which
has been apparently used with no error message by w32grub.exe

As shown above, the NT boot loader seems to find stage1 OK, but then grub
itself hangs during stage2 (and shows no menu, btw).
I've tried disabling lba32 emulation as suggested in the grub FAQ for some
SCSI controllers but this has not helped.

[garyng]

when you run w32grub, there should be some message pumping out, may I have a look ?

[baldyeti]

Hi Gary, here's what I see:
C:\boot\grub>C:\boot\grub\w32grub.exe
stage1(11336301)
version=3.2
boot_drive=ff
force_lba=0
stage2_address=0x8000
stage2_sector=11336301
stage2_segment=0x800
stage2(11336301+223)
menu (hd0,0)/boot/grub/menu.lst
and here's my menu.lst::
# Boot automatically after a minute.
timeout 60

# By default, boot the second entry.
default 1

# Fallback to the first entry.
fallback 0

title Windows NT
unhide (hd0,0)
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

# For booting Linux
title Knoppix
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz
initrd /boot/miniroot.gz

[garyng]

looks perfectly fine for me as far as w32grub goes. Would you try to 'delete' or 'mv' menu.lst somewhere to see if you can see the GRUB shell(command line).

BTW, you can add "-i a:" to install a GRUB shell to a floppy. This would at least tell you if it is the menu searching process failed or the stage2 loading failed.

Because I only have one machine here, I cannot do much test but I have tried on two different HD(one busted recently) on both FAT and NTFS and both works fine, though mine is only cheapo IDE and not SCSI.

[baldyeti]

I renamed menu.lst to menu.knx, but did not get any prompt (still hangs).
Then I installed grub to floppy. This one boots, but I don't know what to type !-{
This is NT4, btw. Thanks for your help.

[garyng]

um, strange.

at the GRUB prompt you can say:

root (hd,0)
configfile /boot/grub/menu.lst

or

'help' to see a list of commands

you can install GRUB at the prompt but I would advice you to read the manual on their site or some of those HOWTOs.

I have no idea why it stuck at the end of stage2 as it should be pretty straight forward by just reading in sector by sector and the log of w32grub shows that everything is fine.

Sorry can't help any further.

[baldyeti]

root (hd,0)
works fine, correctly reports ntfs


configfile /boot/grub/menu.lst
fails with "Error 16: Inconsistent filesystem structure"

Don't mean to bug you, just to report the outcome of your suggestions.
Anyway this is my workstation at work, which I won't touch for another 3 days!

Cheers,

bald.

[garyng]

root (hd,0)
works fine, correctly reports ntfs


configfile /boot/grub/menu.lst
fails with "Error 16: Inconsistent filesystem structure"

Don't mean to bug you, just to report the outcome of your suggestions.
Anyway this is my workstation at work, which I won't touch for another 3 days!

Cheers,

bald.

oops, that is something beyond me. Seems that the NTFS file system code doesn't like what it sees. Unfortunately, that is not something I am able fix as I only grab someone's code and glue the stuff together and knows very little(none actually) about the inner work of the file system code.

Thanks for the efforts to test it out and letting me know.

Just in case you are interested,

http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/gnu/gnudoc/grub-0.92/html_node/Stage2-errors.html

which you can see that it indicates some 'bugs'. This is not surprisng given that all the open source NTFS stuff are hacks and Microsoft changes its structure among versions. I remembered that its early day NTFS loader(NT 3.x) cannot properly handle later version of NTFS and they still just call it NTFS.