Error parsing number.....

[linuxardo]

i try to insatll grub in my pendrive so thAt i can boot from it ...
i sucessfully copiied the grub stage files in the pen drive but when i typed the command geometry(sd <tab key>) its gives the message "Error parsing number"
and i cannot instal grub in my pen drive...
whats the problem?????

[deathadder]

15 : "Error while parsing number"

This error is returned if GRUB was expecting to read a number and encountered bad data.
http://www.uruk.org/orig-grub/errors.html

Seems to be a issue with the BIOS and Grub not reading the geometry correctly...

This might help, sorry I'm not more help!
http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=18785&st=20

[bwkaz]

First, the only disks that grub can use at boot time are the ones that your BIOS will support, so this whole enterprise may not work anyway. If your BIOS doesn't emulate an old-style disk interface on USB storage devices, then grub won't work from it. That being said, lots of people are able to boot grub from USB devices somehow or other.

As for your actual issue: No disk in grub uses the "sd" prefix; all of them use hd as the prefix. The only disks that grub can use at install time are the ones in its device map file. This file is usually either provided by your distro or built up as a default. You can build extra mappings in the grub shell using the "map" command, though. For instance, "map (hd5) /dev/sda" will make that running grub shell (and only that running grub shell, not grub at boot time!) treat your OS's /dev/sda device as its (hd5) device. So e.g. an "install (hd5)" should then work.

I've only ever used this to install grub onto a dm-raid setup, where the default grub mapping points (hd0) to /dev/sda, but both /dev/sda and /dev/sdb are mapped via dm-raid to something like /dev/mapper/raid1 (or whatever). So in that case I'll do something like "map (hd0) /dev/mapper/raid1" (and then "geometry (hd0)" to make sure it worked OK). This lets the kernel dm-raid code replicate the grub writes to both physical disk devices.