the dvd burning machine was finished being built last weekend. since there were no X packages to emerge, the build process was relatively quick. i booted the machine without the licecd today for the first time, as i was ready to begin burning some of the dvds i have backlogged on erebus.

come to find out, when the machine booted and tried to load grub (the boot loader), i ran across a serious problem. grub was printing “GRUB GRUB GRUB…” in an infinite loop. after grepping around the forums and googling what i could, several people hinted at the fact that manually configuring grub might have been a problem. the official grub people recommend using grub-install.

i tried this to solve my problem with no luck. another such solution hinted that the geometry of my MBR (on hd0) was screwed up. the solution was to wipe the drive completely (copy zeros to the device file) and reinstall. this would mean either backing up the current / directory or bonking the entire install. neither sounded very appealing, so i kept looking for another solution.

then i found this helpful grub thread in the forums. right underneath “Grub error 18″ is a mention of my problem. the solution was to switch from Auto detecting HDD types in the bios to specifying them with “User Type HDD”. i loved this solution as it was a hardware issue and not a software one (that required a rebuild of the system). i switched the types and used LBA since the drive is small.

it booted perfectly fine. so word to the wise, grub-096 seems to not like Auto detection HDD types.

one last thing. i have several posts i have been itching to make this week and have written down their topics as not to forget. tonight crystal and i will be watching “Finding Neverland”, so i may not get to posting them tonight. tomorrow, i have plenty of work to do on my network, so i will have time to make the appropriate posts (got 100+ packages to rebuild on citadel).

don’t touch that dial