Hello,
I've recently gotten a new workstation at university. It came with Windows 7 and of course, I added Fedora 21 to the mix. However, each time I log into Windows and reboot, it seems to get stuck in a kind of boot loop at BIOS - probably can't find grub. Would anyone know what causes this? Seems to be some Windows boot repair?
It's quite simple to fix - boot into rescue mode from a netinstall or dvd media and reinstall grub. However, when I do this, grub gives me a message on the lines of:
Installing for i386-pc platform. grub2-install: warning: Sector 5 is already in use by the program ‘ZISD’; avoiding it. This software may cause boot or other problems in future. Please ask its authors not to store data in the boot track.
I've looked around and ZISD seems to be some Novell program - I'm really not sure what it is. Can I remove it? Is there a simple way to? Will my system always loose grub after booting to Windows??
-- Thanks, Warm regards, Ankur Sinha "FranciscoD"
On 10/23/2014 11:47 AM, Ankur Sinha wrote:
Hello,
I've recently gotten a new workstation at university. It came with Windows 7 and of course, I added Fedora 21 to the mix. However, each time I log into Windows and reboot, it seems to get stuck in a kind of boot loop at BIOS - probably can't find grub. Would anyone know what causes this? Seems to be some Windows boot repair?
It's quite simple to fix - boot into rescue mode from a netinstall or dvd media and reinstall grub. However, when I do this, grub gives me a message on the lines of:
Installing for i386-pc platform. grub2-install: warning: Sector 5 is already in use by the program
‘ZISD’; avoiding it. This software may cause boot or other problems in future. Please ask its authors not to store data in the boot track.
I've looked around and ZISD seems to be some Novell program - I'm really not sure what it is. Can I remove it? Is there a simple way to? Will my system always loose grub after booting to Windows??
-- Thanks, Warm regards, Ankur Sinha "FranciscoD"
As you probably discovered, it's "Zenworks Imaging Safe Data". Among other things, Zenworks is used for PXE deployment, and this data provides some workstation-specific variables for imaging. We use Zenworks at my $DAYJOB, although not in such detail; the idea is a whole package solution for imaging, software deployment, configuration, user management, etc to effectively make workstations disposable. Think cobbler+puppet with a nice web GUI and... unpredictable results - only some unique data is stored in the mbr padding instead of /in addition to the server. Ask me sometime if you're curious, I won't rant here :)
So, if you overwrite this, the university IT staff would loose the ability to reimage your machine on demand. If you had garbaged up your Windows installation, they could theoretically just plug it into an imaging switch and the tools would Do The Right Thing when setting up your machineIDs and such. Reimaging without the Imaging Safe Data would be just like if your HDD had crashed and the data was unavailable; they'd have to do minutes more work to redeploy the specced image to your machine.
To make things more fun, these values can be changed by the Admin at any time, enabled by the Zenworks Agent running in Windows, which is why you've had to reinstall grub repeatedly. Just like puppet - configurations are *enforced*, not just defined.
I'd suggest creating a partition whose filesystem has extra padding for the grub binary, or installing GRUB directly to a BIOSBOOT type dummy partition. In theory, ZCM should only be touching sectors 34-63 these days, but I wouldn't want to fight that battle with the university's IT administration :P
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On 10/24/14 01:47, Ankur Sinha wrote:
Hello,
I've recently gotten a new workstation at university. It came with Windows 7 and of course, I added Fedora 21 to the mix. However, each time I log into Windows and reboot, it seems to get stuck in a kind of boot loop at BIOS - probably can't find grub. Would anyone know what causes this? Seems to be some Windows boot repair?
It's quite simple to fix - boot into rescue mode from a netinstall or dvd media and reinstall grub. However, when I do this, grub gives me a message on the lines of:
Installing for i386-pc platform. grub2-install: warning: Sector 5 is already in use by the program ‘ZISD’; avoiding it. This software may cause boot or other problems in future. Please ask its authors not to store data in the boot track.
I've looked around and ZISD seems to be some Novell program - I'm really not sure what it is. Can I remove it? Is there a simple way to? Will my system always loose grub after booting to Windows??
Google ZISD. Look at screen. See "GRUB and ZISD - Cool Solutions | Novell" as second entry.
Click on link.
https://www.novell.com/communities/coolsolutions/grub-and-zisd/
Enjoy....
- -- If you can't laugh at yourself, others will gladly oblige.
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On 10/24/14 06:18, Ed Greshko wrote:
Google ZISD.
or Google "zisd grub" for a better list of reading material.
- -- If you can't laugh at yourself, others will gladly oblige.
On Fri, 2014-10-24 at 06:18 +0800, Ed Greshko wrote:
Google ZISD. Look at screen. See "GRUB and ZISD - Cool Solutions | Novell" as second entry.
Click on link.
https://www.novell.com/communities/coolsolutions/grub-and-zisd/
I actually tried that - it didn't seem to work. Instead of one sector with ZISD, now I have 2.
The post is from 2008 and is probably referring to legacy GRUB.
From the error I had posted earlier, I think GRUB2 leaves the sector occupied by ZISD be.
On 10/23/2014 03:50 PM, Ankur Sinha wrote:
I actually tried that - it didn't seem to work. Instead of one sector with ZISD, now I have 2.
The post is from 2008 and is probably referring to legacy GRUB.
From the error I had posted earlier, I think GRUB2 leaves the sector occupied by ZISD be.
I would recommend backing up the original sectors, then after doing the described copy, write over the original sectors with zeros. Then GRUB won't find it.
On Oct 23, 2014 4:50 PM, "Ankur Sinha" sanjay.ankur@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, 2014-10-24 at 06:18 +0800, Ed Greshko wrote:
Google ZISD. Look at screen. See "GRUB and ZISD - Cool Solutions | Novell" as second entry.
Click on link.
https://www.novell.com/communities/coolsolutions/grub-and-zisd/
I actually tried that - it didn't seem to work. Instead of one sector with ZISD, now I have 2.
The post is from 2008 and is probably referring to legacy GRUB.
From the error I had posted earlier, I think GRUB2 leaves the sector occupied by ZISD be. -- Thanks, Regards, Ankur (FranciscoD)
The post is telling you how to move the bits manually. It's mostly relevant to admins migrating from the pre-2008 version of the software doing the writing, to the version that knows better. Since you said that GRUB is trashed after every Windows boot, I think it is safe to assume that any changes you make to these sectors will not persist. It doesn't matter if you're writing GRUB or zeroes or what. It probably happens on 'refresh' - ie on boot, on every network transition, and every hour or two in between. You probably have a little bluish circle in the Windows system tray; right click, hit "show properties" and dig around to verify.
Unless you can convince the uni IT to upgrade their [very outdated and anecdotally terrible] system management infrastructure, or block that functionality on your machine, I think you will have to put GRUB somewhere else.
Nice seeing you in a sane time zone for a change, Ankur :)
--Pete
On 10/23/2014 04:36 PM, Pete Travis wrote:
The post is telling you how to move the bits manually. It's mostly relevant to admins migrating from the pre-2008 version of the software doing the writing, to the version that knows better. Since you said that GRUB is trashed after every Windows boot, I think it is safe to assume that any changes you make to these sectors will not persist. It doesn't matter if you're writing GRUB or zeroes or what. It probably happens on 'refresh' - ie on boot, on every network transition, and every hour or two in between. You probably have a little bluish circle in the Windows system tray; right click, hit "show properties" and dig around to verify.
Unless ZISD will detect that it's now in the new location and leave GRUB alone.