Grub loading

Mike McCarty Mike.McCarty at sbcglobal.net
Mon Apr 10 16:43:21 UTC 2006


Brian Candlish wrote:
> Dear Sir or Madam,
> 
> Having installed and reinstalled Fedora Core 5, my grub load
> er simply will not boot Fedora, yet will do so for Windows X
> P. When trying to load Fedora I get the following response:-
> 
> 
> Boot
> Uncompressing Linux …
> Crc error
> --System halted
> 
> 
> Can anyone please explain what a crc error is and what I can
> do about it.

A CRC is a Cyclic Redundancy Check. It is a means by which one
can check for corruption of data. Simply put, it's very much
like checking a balance sheet by "casting out nines". If the
"nines sums" are not the same, then the computations cannot
be correct. In this case, the kernel has the "nines sum"
(CRC) appended. The one computed when the kernel was created
is not the same as the one computed after the kernel was
decompressed, so something went wrong.

> All suggestions gratefully received – I thought of booting
> from a floppy but can’t get grub to work via a floppy!

My guess is that somehow your copy of the kernel (vmlinuz)
got clobbered either before or after you installed it. You
need to replace it with a known good copy.

GRUB is even easier to install and use from a floppy than
from a hard disc. I wonder why you are having a problem?
Have a look here:

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/html_node/Creating-a-GRUB-boot-floppy.html

You'll have to poke around to find those files, based
on your distribution. Mine are in

/usr/share/grub/i386-redhat/

Anyway, if you need more info about CRCs, I can give it
to you, but it's probably not on-topic here. I have devised
CRCs both for error detection and for forward error correction
(FEC). If you are only casually interested, you may look
here:

http://www.ross.net/crc/crcpaper.html

You may find copies of this paper splattered around the 'net,
but I like to go to the source.

Mike
-- 
p="p=%c%s%c;main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}";main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}
This message made from 100% recycled bits.
You have found the bank of Larn.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
I speak only for myself, and I am unanimous in that!




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