Grub Error 18
Last night I decided to completely redo my webserver at home after viewing some suspicious logs. That, and I’ve made a complete mess out of it. Scattered files, reckless installations, etc.
Being the glutton for punishment that I am, I decided to install the soon to be released Ubuntu 6.10, Edgy Eft. I’m using it now on my laptop; my PC at work; and, as of last night, my webserver. So, I downloaded the Edgy x86 Server disc from here. Installation went rather smoothly. I especially liked that it allowed you to do a base server with LAMP and/or DNS server capabilities pre-installed. So, happy with the smooth install I rebooted.
That’s when it hit the fan. When Grub went to start launching ubuntu I got a pretty “Error 18″ message. Being the “I can figure it out!” kind of guy I am, I tried using the install CD’s rescue mode. I reinstalled Grub….same error. I opened a shell, fought with Vi, went into another tty and vi worked perfectly (of course), edited sources.list and added universe and multiverse. I updated my machine in the hopes that maybe it was a kernel issue or something weird that would be cured this way. I rebooted…
SAME ERROR!
So, I Googled some more and found that it could be a BIOS-related issue, something with the /boot partition not being within the either the first 512 MB or 8 GB. So, I bit the bullet and reinstalled. I made a 500 MB /boot partition at hda1, a 1.5 GB swap partition at hda2, and a 300-some GB / partition at hda3.
I know a 500 MB /boot partition is overkill, but with 320 GB drive I can spare it and I’d rather not have to think about it filling up. Oh, and before I get the standard “there’s no way you could fill up even 32 MB,” I have filled up more than that, more than 64 MB if I recall correctly. This is Ubuntu, not Gentoo, kernels are larger than the 2 MB kernels you are used to. They are more along the lines of 60 MB. I just checked the latest kernel image size…it’s 66 MB. So, I’d rather not worry about my /boot partition filling up.
So, I rebooted, and all is well! So, I get to play around some. I’m going to setup a subversion repository to backup my home directory and distribute it to multiple computers. I’ll try to post about this when I get it done.