OpenSuSE 11.4 Grub 17 Error

[MkIII_Supra]

I have tried PartedMagic to repair GRUB. Fail.

The system is OpenSuSE only, not dual boot. The primary drive is brand new and until this morning worked fine. I was in the middle of using my system when it locked up completely. Something it has never done before. Nothing worked, I couldn't SSH into it from my laptop, CTRL+F1 didn't get me to the command prompt, CTRL+SHIFT+SysRq wouldn't work. So I had to hard boot the system.

It came down and during the start up I got the GRUB 17 error message.

The set up is as follows:

SDA1 = / File System = ext4
SDA3 = /Sys_Meters File System = ext4
SDF1 = SWAP
SDF2 = /BkUps File System = ext4
MD0 = /home File System = REISER
MD1 = /Specials File System = REISER
MD2 = /VMWare File System = REISER

This is a 4 core 3.0GHz Intel CPU with 8GB RAM. It is a work system (no support from ITS as it runs Linux only) and has been reliable up until about 44 days ago when SDA failed and had to be replaced. And now the GRUB 17 error that I can't seem to figure out how to repair.

Ideas? I am close to re-installing the entire system just so I can get back to work and get my billing out the door. But I would much rather I fix the problem and not have to start all over.

[MkIII_Supra]

Okay... so I blasted the install. Re-installed after a complete format of the / partition. Even redid my partitions so as to have a specified /boot partition just for grub to reside on. Install went great then when I went to reboot after a complete after install update...

"GRUB loading stage1.5.


GRUB loading, please wait...
Error 17"

So in other words I am stuck. Don't know what to do. All the help I have found so far points to dual boot systems. Any ideas?

[saikee]

According to GNU/Grub 0.97 manual

17 : Cannot mount selected partition
    This error is returned if the partition requested exists, but the filesystem type cannot be recognized by GRUB.

My guess is Grub not booting the correct partition. This could be caused by your hard boot mis-arranging the boot disk order.

To investigate you can press "c" key and drop into a Grub prompt and then issue these commands

geometry (hd0)
geometry (hd1)

If your disk order is correct then (hd0) should show up two partitions both Type 83 whereas (hd1) will have Type 82 in partition 0 because it is a swap.

Can you confirm if (hd0) is your sda?

Can you post here the output of

su
fdisk -l

say using a Live CD