On Sat, Apr 07, 2007 at 01:30:57 +0200, Matt Miller wrote: > > I've attached an external hard drive to my etch AMD64 box, booted my > > AMD64 box into the debian installer, and installed a fresh i386 etch > > onto the external drive. > > Now I can't boot my box without the external drive attached, because > grub complains with "error 21." I'm thinking that when the debian > installer made the external drive bootable with my new i386 etch some > stuff happened with the master boot record or something. Also, when I > put the external drive into my Pentium III box, nothing happens. > Apparently the right MBR stiff is not on there. > > Anyway, I'm in a bit deep at this point. Hopefully there is some simple > way to prepare the external drive on my AMD64 box to be the internal, > bootable drive of my Pentium III, and to tell grub on my AMD64 box that > it doesn't need the external drive attached in order to boot. > > Go ahead and laugh. Just give me some good advice when you're done.
It looks like the MBR of your Etch installation was rewritten so that grub now looks for /boot on the external drive. The Etch installer disk has a rescue mode which should allow you to make your normal installation bootable again. I think you just have to type "rescue" at the boot prompt and off you go. It will try to find your root partition and reconstruct the MBR and grub accordingly. I never had to use this myself therefore I am shaky on the details. Try the F1 - F7 online help of the installation disk. Also, see here: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/325 (If the other system cannot boot from USB directly then you might have to make a grub boot disk for it.) -- Regards, Florian -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
