[PLUG] GRUB Error 17

MJang mike at mommabears.com
Tue Sep 26 14:35:56 UTC 2006


On Mon, 2006-09-25 at 23:03 -0700, Richard C. Steffens wrote:
> A network installation of SuSE 10.1 finished, but failed to boot from 
> the hard drive. When I did this last week the error message was number 
> 18. This evening I ran FDISK (from my old RH 7 CD) so there was an empty 
> partition table when the installation program got to it.
> 
> I wasn't sitting at the machine last week when it tried to boot after 
> the install, but I assume it went about the same as this evening. After 
> finishing all it's work, the installation program initiated a reboot. I 
> didn't take out the CD, so that's what booted. I chose the default 
> option, which is to continue booting from the hard drive. GRUB got into 
> stage 1.5, but then gave me the error 17 message.
> 
> I won't have any time to work on this until tomorrow (Tuesday) evening, 
> but I have found this in the GRUB manual:
> 
> 17: Cannot mount selected partition
>         This error is returned if the partition requested exists, but 
> the filesystem type cannot be recognized by GRUB.

I suspect most install programs write GRUB to the MBR via the
grub-install command. That command doesn't always work.

I would check your menu.lst (the commands that you can see from the GRUB
menu) from the GRUB command line. Assuming you've done the default for
SUSE and installed on one partition, this seems appropriate (just from a
quick google of error 17) http://www.smop.co.uk/node/43 Sometimes the
selected partition is wrong. (my system has been screwed up before when
the order of partition numbers don't match the order on the physical
drive, e.g. /dev/hda1, /dev/hda3, /dev/hda2)

Assuming you can boot into SUSE via its rescue mode (from the install
CD), you should be able to get into the GRUB command line from the OS,
and reinstall into the MBR from the GRUB prompt (assuming the first HD)
with the following command:

setup (hd0).

Since you've looked at the GRUB manual (ref for others
<www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/html_node/Command-line-and-menu-entry-commands.html> ) you can see what other commands you might try.

Thanks,
Mike




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