Read Error

[Oliver Fuchs]

Hi all,

sorry for bothering you. This is not a real bug report for it is 
neither precise enough nor reproducible.

I have an old PC with the following configuration:

hda1 FAT  // fli4l and M$DOS for maintenance
hda2 ext2 // grub 0.94 installed to MBR
hda3 swap
hda4 ext3 // suse 9.0

The PC is controlled via serial console.
Once I decided to change hda2 from ext2 to ext3. So I did:
# mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/hda2
# cd /mnt
# tar -czf ~/hda2.tgz hda2
# umount /mnt/hda2
# mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hda2
# mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/hda2
# tar -xzf ~/hda2.tgz
# reboot
This didn't work, but I was not that surprised and got the machine up 
with a native grub floppy.
Than I reinstalled GRUB from the GRUB command prompt
# root (hd0,1)
# setupt (hd0)
The print output was fine, but the result was "Read Error" after 
reboot. 
I tried the installation from grub shell under Suse 9.0 -> same 
result.
I copied the directory grub to hda1 and tried it with root (hd0,0) -> 
same result.
I copied a backup to the grub directory & reinstalled it again -> 
same result.
Then I started DOS and restored the MBR with M$ fdisk.
DOS came up without problems after reboot.
I reinstalled grub as described above. -> I still got Read Error.
Finally I downloaded grub-0.95-i386-pc.tar.gz from 
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub
and installed it on hda1 by making a native floppy and the procedure 
above. Now it works fine, except that GRUB 0.95 comes up with "GNU 
GRUB version 0.94". But this is only a cosmetic problem.

It seems that there was something rotten (not in Denmark but) after 
the MBR.
The question is: why was grub not able to fix the damaged 
installation by reinstallation?

Best regards,
Oliver