[LBo] Mishap with grub-reboot

[Lonnie Mullenix]

Heh,

You really make me feel Good about Not dual-booting.  It is So nice to
have each OS on it's own computer, even if they are three Debian's and
one Gentoo.

Later,

Lonnie


On Thu, 2007-01-04 at 19:15 -0500, Anita Lewis wrote:
> I tried something and got my fingers burned.  I don't know why, but here
> is what happened.
> 
> I found the command 'grub-reboot' and read the manpage and decided to
> try it.  The idea was to run it with the stanza in grub that I wanted to
> reboot into.  I put '2' in because I had Windows as my second stanza. I
> forgot that it should be '1' but when the menu came up and I saw that I
> wasn't getting Windows, I selected it and that was that.
> 
> Then I rebooted thinking I would go into Ubuntu.  Not so.  I got:
> 
> Error 18: Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS
> 
> I also got it with a few other choices, but with the single user mode, I
> got booted.  Over and over I tried.  I examined menu.lst to see how that
> looked.  I deleted quiet and splash and anything strange looking. Still,
> no way in except single user and then exit into multi-user.
> 
> Finally I tried running 'grub-set-default 0' and I was able to boot
> normally.
> 
> Prior to using the grub-reboot command, I looked at /boot/grub/default
> and it was a normal text file which said not to edit directly.  When I
> was having the problem, I found it was a binary file.  After the fix, it
> still says it is binary, but I can open it in vi and there is only a
> small weird character in it, but it has 0 as the first character.  I see
> the notice not to edit it.
> 
> So that is my story.  It looks like grub-reboot is not all that safe to
> run, although perhaps it would not have caused the problem if I had used
> '1' instead of '2'. Stanza 3 (grub 2) is a working boot option; so I
> don't know why that would be an issue.  Perhaps it had to do with my
> interrupting and booting into something else.  I have no idea.  Just
> thought I'd let you know in case you see the command and want to try it.
>  Be prepared to use that single-user safe mode and to run
> grub-set-default if you get the same issue I did.
> 
> Anita
-- 
Running Gentoo and
Debian, enjoying the
MS free life on the
internet.