Thank you PCLinuxOS

[Reb]

I played around with an old hard drive (ripped from a no longer working freeview box), and somehow messed up the jumper settings between the original hard drive and the dvd rom.

And of course the machine would not boot properly, kept complaining about a bad super block LoL

I was scratching my head, thinking what's wrong ?
I only disconnected the original drive, then connected the old freeview drive, worked on it, got it sorted out,removed it for a spare drive, and reconnected the original drive ?

after several attempts to boot the machine, re-load the machine (grub would not load with error 15 whatever that means), and generally checking things over (powered off and disconnected from the mains), the power supply went pop when I tried to re boot!     

AAARRRGGHH   

when I checked, it was from April 2007, and a cheap "no brand" psu, so can't really complain.

Anyway, I had a spare psu / motherboard / cpu and ram left from the wifes upgrade last year, and got to work.

built it up, switched it on and......................... no post test beep, no error beeps nothing, but it was powered up fine ?

back to scratching head, and more thought..........................

then I remembered the mother board had no internal speaker attatched (hence no beeps), and then I remembered the monitor was set to digital, when it was an analogue signal (dsub) on this machine.
set monitor to analogue, and voila, a picture and at last I could enter the bios screen and set it up.

told it to boot from the old drive, and........................... bad super block grub error 15 !

now ordinarily I would conceed the drive is old and probably knackered, but it was working perfectly before I started messing around, and couldn't see how merely disconnecting it would have damaged it.

back to scratching head...................... and more thought.

Then I checked the jumpers on the dvd rom drive and found it set to master, and so was the hard drive (on the same ide cable), well DUH !

on the old motherboard there were two ide channels, on this motherboard only one ide channel exists.

after several seconds, kicking myself, and calling myself several expletives it was sorted.

and it worked ! hip hip hooray.....

but for some reason grub was still screwed, I could have just re-installed grub, but decided to re-install PCLinuxOS complete, I did not format my home partition,  all my data was still there, intact and safe and sound.

the hard drive is of a reasonable age (2007), but then again, it's working fine and I am happy with it.

THANKS PCLinuxOS, that was easy, apart from my silly mistakes 

I am so out of practice 

[Bald Brick]

grub would not load with error 15 whatever that means

From a post by stringofthoughts on a Debian help page:

The reason for grub error 15 is very simple and so is the solution. The error gives you a message “Error 15: File not found!” simply because the file grub wants is not there. why? because grub is looking into a wrong device. You need to make changes to your /boot/grub/menu.lst file to fix the problem so that grub looks into the correct device but first find out where is your root partition.Boot from a live CD -> open terminal .

[Reb]

Thank you for that Bald brick,

I have learned what error 15 means.

and if it ever happens again, I'll know where to look.

cheers 

[Reb]

Well, following Bald brick's lead, I stopped being lazy and Google'd grub errors !

I came across this nice little list, which someone may find useful.............

http://www.uruk.org/orig-grub/errors.html

[Old-Polack]

Well, following Bald brick's lead, I stopped being lazy and Google'd grub errors !

I came across this nice little list, which someone may find useful.............

http://www.uruk.org/orig-grub/errors.html

If you open the Konqueror web browser, clear the location bar, then type info:grub and press the Enter key, you will have full access to the grub manual that explains everything grub related. 

[aguila]

And to top that one:

Code:

info:/dir

will give you a full list of which info to find there. It's a lot 

[Old-Polack]

And to top that one:

Code:

info:/dir

will give you a full list of which info to find there. It's a lot  

No need for the / ; info:dir works just fine.

[aguila]

You got me... I just entered "info:" and "info:/dir" came up 

[Reb]

I learn more and more thanks folks