On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 5:23 PM, Walter Cazzola <cazzola@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Dear Fedora Experts, > I' ve recently bought a new Dell Precision m6800 and today I was trying to > install Fedora 23 in dual boot with windows 7 (this was the OS originally on > the machine). > > I' ve run the installer from the live CD and after a couple of wrong > attempts I successfully finished the installation process without errors or > at least apparently without errors. > > I' ve restarted the machine I got into the following error message: > > file "/boot/grub2/i386-pc/normal.mod" NOT FOUND > grub rescue> That is a bootloader file, and it's a binary that's only ever found on computers with BIOS firmware. On computers with UEFI firmware, it's not needed. So if this m6800 has UEFI, it must have legacy boot enabled... oh hell. > neither windows nor fedora boot. > > Booting again from the live cd I got that ever the partition are there: > > > Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type > /dev/sda1 63 80324 80262 39.2M de Dell Utility This is a huge red flag. Can you boot off live media, connect to wifi if supported out of the box, or plug in an ethernet cable and run: # parted /dev/sda u s p > parted.txt # fpaste parted.txt And you'll get a URL you can post. Like this: http://ur1.ca/ocxjd I want to know if this is GPT or MBR and what the physical sector size is, because LBA 63 on a 512e AF drive is bad news performance wise and some companies did do this for a while including Dell and it's just... really f'n annoyingly incompetent. I do have a work around that's rather tedious but we get to that later. If you're feeling brave, it's semi worthwhile poking around the firmware setup (probably F2) to see if you can find the words Secure Boot. I'm curious if this firmware supports it or not. Don't change the setting, I just want to know if you can find it or not. > /dev/sda2 * 81920 25710591 25628672 12.2G 27 Hidden NTFS WinRE > /dev/sda3 25710592 201408511 175697920 83.8G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT > /dev/sda4 201408512 1953523711 1752115200 835.5G 5 Extended > /dev/sda5 201410560 202776575 1366016 667M 83 Linux > /dev/sda6 202778624 307636223 104857600 50G 83 Linux > /dev/sda7 307638272 341192703 33554432 16G 82 Linux swap / > Solaris > /dev/sda8 341194752 351680511 10485760 5G 83 Linux > /dev/sda9 351682560 360071167 8388608 4G 83 Linux > /dev/sda10 360073216 368461823 8388608 4G 83 Linux > /dev/sda11 368463872 371609599 3145728 1.5G 6 FAT16 > /dev/sda12 371611648 1953523711 1581912064 754.3G 83 Linux > > where sda1-3 are the original windows partitions, sda5 is /boot and sda6 is > / > > I' ve mounted the /boot partition and inside grub2 there is not i386-pc dir > nor the normal.mod file. I' ve tried to manually copy > /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/normal.mod into /boot/grub2 but the only difference I > got is that the boot is stucked on > > grub> > > So what I have to do to fix the situation and be able to run both windows > and linux? > The easiest way to fix this and not change anything or reinstall? Is to download netinstall media, ~400MB download. And change the boot parameter line (use the tab key to show the boot param line at the boot menu) and add at the end, inst.rescue. Choose the default option in each, it should find all the parts of the system and assemble them at /mnt/sysimage. Then you can do: # chroot /mnt/sysimage # grub2-install /dev/sda5 --force # grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg And then reboot. What I'm virtually certain has happened is because partition 1 starts at LBA 63, and because Fedora defaults to using LVM, the GRUB core.img is too big to be embedded in the MBR gap. And therefore the installation of the bootloader actually failed during the OS install. Installing the bootloader by embedding to the VBR of /dev/sda5 is suboptimal and not recommended by GRUB upstream, but it is supported with --force which is what that command above will do. And it should be pretty stable. And if it works, then you're done. -- Chris Murphy -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
