[Hampshire] Funny boot problem

well it is funny peculiar for me. I recently installed debian etch on
the PC I got this week, upgraded it to sid and all seemed fine
until I needed to reboot this morning. Got message to say the drive
wouldn't boot though It had done so a couple of time whilst
installing and after.

I re-installed in case the LVM partitioning I'd opted for originally
was playing up. I used Kannotix to get at the home directory after
much reading of LVM man pages and googling and managed to tar my
home directory and scp it to another system from whence I recovered it
after getting the this system up again.

I then re-installed etch and upgraded it to sid as usual, this time
with only /home on a separate partition and no LVM. But it still
would not boot. I was able to get it to boot by using a ubuntu cd and
using the 'boot from hard disk option'

I then re-did 'install-grub /dev/hda' but this didn't make the drive
bootable without having to resort to the use of the CD again.

cfdisk shows that /dev/hda1/ has the bootable flag set. The hard
drive had been performing satisfactorily with ubuntu before I
acquired it and I haven't tweaked anything in the bios to upset
things.

Any clues as to what is going on would be welcome. I suspected a
failing hard disk until I found it would boot OK with a little help.

I don't think I will attempt to use LVM again, at least not on a
system with only a single drive, it is too much effort to get at the
lvm'd partitions if things go wrong.

And I must sort out rsyncing /home to another system so as to have an
up to date system available if things go wrong again. I am pretty
sure I have lost some emails in the process of copying between
boxen but may be able to get them off a third system I have.

--
John Lewis
Debian Linux with Geneweb genealogy application