HD Install :: Stuck attempting frugal grup upgrade

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BIOS is set to boot off CDROM first... I'm using an external cdrom player, which worked fine booting the live CD

What am I missing here? If your BIOS will boots the CD first, you don't need GRUB to load the live CD. Just boot from the live CD so you can at least mount your hard drive and see what the deal is with your frugal partition and maybe "fix" it from there.

Sorry I'm not being clear, folks. The laptop will no longer boot from the live CD.

Why won't it boot the live CD? Did you change the BIOS setting so it won't boot from CD first? BIOS precedes bootloader (GRUB). Check your BIOS again?

Got me...I guess because it's an external, so the grub menu comes up first. Some luck, though. I happened to have another working cdrom drive from my other dell, and installed it That worked, and booted up a CD. I should be in the clear, now. Thanks for the support.

EDIT: I reloaded 3.2 from the live CD on the external cdrom drive again after reinstalling 2.3 to hda1. What's happening is that it loads as a USB device through grub on hda1, and then reads the image (/dev/scd1).

Unfortunately, there's no BIOs setting for booting from a usb device. Thus, if grub is corrupted on hda1, it's all over without a working internal cdrom or floppy drive (on this laptop). That said, I'm fairly certain that I initially installed DSL from the external cdrom drive, in which case if there was a way to bypass grub, it would have loaded. (actually I was hoping someone would tell me to just push <alt-##$&&!> or something on bootup ).

original here.