I'm installing 1.4rc4 on an HP Vectra VA 6/200 with a new 120 GB Maxtor hard drive. I followed the Gentoo Install instructions step by step, but then after the first boot, I just got a black screen that said "GRUB Read Error", and nothing else. I fixed it by digging around on Google, and found this piece of advice: http://www.mail-archive.com/bug-grub@gnu.org/msg06201.html which told me how to fix it by doing the following: >What happens, if you install GRUB this way: > >grub> root (hd0,0) >grub> install /boot/grub/stage1 d (hd0) /boot/grub/stage2 p > >Please do this using a GRUB boot floppy rather than the grub shell. So, it may not be a very common problem and the authors of GRUB seem to know about it, but only offer a workaround instead of a fix. It has to do with the way the BIOS reports the size and partition information of the drive. Apparently, some of the older Vectra machines produce this problem with GRUB. Thanks! Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
I'll take a look on this one.
We have a workaround in our documents for RAID systems (installing GRUB on floppy, then afterwards boot from floppy and install to MBR). This seems to be about what Vectra-users need to do, but the commands given to GRUB (to install it in the MBR) are slighty different. Could you please check if the RAID-implementation works? This won't fuck your system up; if it fails, you just reboot from floppy and issue the working commands again. If the RAID-implementation works, I'll just add that RAID-users and users of broken BIOS'es (such as is the case with old Vectra machines) should follow those directions.
I'll do a notice for this.
Proposed fix on http://cvs.gentoo.org/~swift/gentoo-x86-install.html, search for "fail"
Fixed in cvs.
