Why Sidux wouldn’t boot: after installing Sidux from the Sidux LiveCD to a new partion on my second, 200Gb disk, and rebooting, the machine halted with the message ‘Grub geom error’. It turned out to be a problem with the bios of my Compaq PC. I’d created the new partion at the end of the disk. However the bios reported that my hard disk size was only around 170Gb, rather than 200Gb and so the partion was not visible to the bios and couldn’t be booted.

So, taking a risk, I deleted the new partion and moved the existing partion (my Kanotix /home) up the disk to make the free space at the beginning rather than the end. By the way, this was a lengthy operation (using QParted) and took over 7 hours. Any interruption might have lost my data.

On creating two new partitions at the start of the disk, one for Sidux and one spare, I reinstalled at the start of the disk ,installed Sidux and rebooted and Sidux worked.

That was good news, but now I had another problem! Although the Sidux installation had detected my original Kanotix system, it failed to boot it correctly. Since Kanotix is still my main server system, I wanted to restore it as soon as possible. A Yahoo search turned up Super Grub Disk which I used to create a boot floppy and restore my boot into Kanotix on my primary disk.

(continued…)

Graham