I had a grub issue when installing Debian Sarge (as of today using a netinstall CD) on an old PowerEdge 1650 with a Perc3/di raid card (made by Adaptec).

I was using advanced install with 2.6 kernel, and when I reached the Grub bootloader installation step, it failed miserably with a nice red screen.

Looking at the log console (Alt+F3), I was seeing the following error message : /boot/grub/stage1 not read correctly

If you see something similar, here is the step to get your system back on its legs :

  • Install grub as usual (MBR for me) and let it fail.
  • Go to the secont console (Alt+F2)
  • Chroot to the install target : chroot /target/ bash
  • Tell grub to update its menu.lst (and in our case even create it), this will save you time later : update-grub
  • Then ... exit :)

You can now finish your install as usually.

After a reboot, you will be thrown into the grub shell, you can then setup Grub as you would have done before (but it couldn't then work) :

  • root (hd0,0)
  • setup (hd0)
  • reboot

Your system should now safely reboot into your fresh Sarge install !