New Debian Install - HELP! grub or lilo

[Frank Carmickle]

Hi all

Well I resisted the move from lilo to grub for many years.  I still find it a bit strange on machines that your not quite sure what 0x80 actually is.  Other then that it really is the way to go.  Make sure you know what 0x80 is, what your boot priority in bios is set to, and make sure that /boot/grub/device.map reflects that.  Often if I am unsure of which drive is the boot drive I will put grub on them all and if for some reason that doesn't work it's probably got the wrong rootdev.  Grub's root parameter wants to be pointing to the device where it can find /boot.  The real trouble with this is sometimes you don't know if bios has assigned drives in a different order then you will see them once the kernel has loaded.  Maybe Kerry can shed some light on weather or not there could actually be three different views of disk drive order, bios, boot loader, and kernel?  That aside you can pretty much get there if you are willing to take a few shots in the dark.  

I find it very difficult to fix the boot loader from a chroot environment, but it can be done.  You need to set up the environment before you try running the grub-install or lilo commands.  
chroot to_YOUR_NEW_DIR
mount /proc /sys /dev

One other thing that I have been doing lately if a bootloader fails is boot from pxe.  Then you have a real accessible bunch of config files on your dhcp/tftp server.  You can at least boot in to the real running environment from there to operate in a non chrooted environment.  Once you are done setting up the bootloader on the local drive then you can just comment out the nextserver parameters in your dhcpd.conf reload and your good to go.  

Thanks to Samuel we now have some good debian images that we can use for rescue and install.  Thanks Samuel.

--Frank