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rolfp
no-shill zone
Premium Member
join:2011-03-27
Oakland, CA

rolfp to squircle

Premium Member

to squircle

Re: Motherboard suddenly stopped booting?

Did you before the swap and/or do you now have a drive connected to Generic (Silicon Image-based) PCI IDE controller ? I've seen whether or not a controller is enabled in BIOS affects grub's identification of disks, resulting in blinking cursor.

Another diagnostic is to put an empty file as a marker at the root of your drive by booting some removable device and doing something like:

# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
# touch /mnt/2011-ssd
# umount /mnt

Then, after calling the grub shell on this or some other live bootable device that has grub on it:
# grub
Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.
 
    GNU GRUB  version 0.97  (640K lower / 3072K upper memory)
 
 [ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported.  For the first word, TAB
   lists possible command completions.  Anywhere else TAB lists the possible
   completions of a device/filename. ]
grub> find /2011-ssd
find /2011-ssd
 (hd0,1)
grub> quit
quit
#
 

That can help get the grub syntax correct or give some other clue but it's not always straightforward. I've found that grub sees a different disk order at the grub boot screen vs. after the OS is booted, sometimes. I've been running five or six drives and have installed grub to the MBR of every drive, at times, to get it loaded at boot. The BIOS can re-enumerate disks at times, especially after booting a removable drive for an occasional run of something or other. In the BIOS on this machine, there is a place to set the boot order and a place to set HDD priority, which affects what happens in the boot order. I'm thinking it's a matter of how you have the BIOS and/or grub configured. :)

squircle
join:2009-06-23
OTWAON10

squircle

Member

Thanks for the post. Neither drive was ever connected to the PCI IDE controller, and I've never booted from the controller. I have the boot drive set as #1 to boot right now, and none of the other connected drives (all to the Highpoint RAID controller) have bootloaders on them. The trouble is, the system isn't even booting into GRUB; if it was, I'd know how to repair it. I've tried reinstalling the bootloader to the drive but it hasn't helped.

That's what I can't make sense of: I have it set first in boot order, I've verified that GRUB is intact, but the machine refuses to boot from that (or any other) IDE drive. I know it's not the drive, so I figured it was the motherboard crapping out.

To your last point, I wish it was a GRUB or BIOS config issue; those are easy to solve