Despite having major issues early in the week, I finally got Gentoo running on my new HTPC box. Of course, right now I just have a minimal install… just the core packages, but at least I’m able to boot up and log in and all… and my initial kernel is pretty sound. It’s missing a few modules for ancillary stuff, but it’s sound.
But I have this really strange issue, and I’m not really sure what to make of it. I even had one of the guys from the #gentoo-amd64 IRC channel trying to help me out. When I reboot, instead of getting the grub boot menu, it takes me to grub shell. I can actually boot the machine with the following:
>kernel /kernel-2.6.9_14_gjh01 >boot
This suggests to me that grub is installed correctly, and I’m able to actually boot using grub. I triple checked my grub.conf file, and it seems to be okay, but I don’t get the grub menu no matter what I try. Eventually, I got really into what I could do with the grub prompt, since that’s all I could get. I found out I was able to successfully load the splash image – but I didn’t get the menu… just the grub prompt over the splash image:
>splashimage=/grub/splash.xpm/gz
Finally, I found out that there is a command to load the configuration file from the grub prompt:
>configfile=/grub/grub.conf
And lo and behold… when I did that, the menu screen came up.
So the state of things appears to be… When I reboot, the grub menu doesn’t come up, but I can load the menu manually and then boot the system using the menu.
One other thing to note: When I follow the instructions to load grub into the mbr manually, All indications are that the process was successful. If I try to use the install-grub command, I get some BIOS drive error.
(note to self: when you get home from work check to see if the bootable flag is set on /dev/hda1 with fdisk)
