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Hello all, I hope that I don't frustrate the forum with my first post. I am new to linux, but am otherwise pretty comfortable with computers. Here's my issue:
I had a good installation of Core 5 running. I wanted to try to load DSL onto my USB Flash Drive. After booting off of DSL and trying to start Frugal Lite to perform the installation, which is what I thought needed to be done, the process seemed to hang at a line creating a directory in /etc/...
After several minutes I was impatient, and somewhat concerned about my nice new Core 5 installation. I rebooted the machine and pulled out the CD and was met with:
GRUB>
I'm new to all of this so I started doing some research. I checked my partitions, which were still the default:
HD0,0
HD0,1
I tried FIND /boot/grub/grub.conf and FIND /boot/grub/start1 and found nothing. I don't recall if those were the exact paths offhand, but I had copied them verbatim from a forum. I also wasn't able to mount the partition /dev/hda.
Next, I rebooted to the Core 5 Installation Disc 1 and started linux rescue. When I got to the shell, I typed chroot /mnt/sysimage. I tried to edit the HD for grub.conf with nano, but it I'm greeting with a new file.
What should I run, check, modify to get grub to start Fedora again? Please include commands and paths as I'm still learning the environment. Any help would great!
The files you were looking for were "menu.lst" and "stage1" - as per the ls above from decrepit.
Try the find commands again (correct this time ) and use the partition returned (say (hd0,0) ) in the following
Code:
root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)
reboot
If that doesn't work, yes your grub is hosed.
EDIT: you may need to do the find against /grub/... rather than /boot/grub/... - at that stage, Linux mounts are assumed for /boot even though Linux hasn't been loaded as yet.
I tried the FIND and came up null.
root (hd0,0)
Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x83
setup (hd0)
Error 17: Cannot mount selected partition
So this isn't good. How can I reinstall GRUB? I was reading that I can boot Linux manually by loading the kernel, but I'd have to find the full kernel name. Should I use the rescue CD to do that? I would be running something like:
root (hd0,0)
kernel <kernel name> ro root=hd0
boot
correct?
The syntax is a bit off, so I'll have to recheck it. I would like to rescue this machine rather than reinstall everything. Thanks for all of your help!
Manually booting is not that difficult, it's just intimidating. I know; I've done it more than once when I screwed up GRUB.
You've got the basic idea down. Did you have /boot on a different partition? If not, it could change how you have to do this; these instructions assume a separate /boot partition on /dev/hda1.
root (hd0,0)
What you can do to figure out your kernel is to type the 'vmlinuz' or some part of the kernel name (if it's Fedora's default, it will be vmlinuz{number}) and press tab. Assuming it's reading the partition correctly, that is. So you'll type this (the {tab} is where you press tab to get the number):
kernel vmlinu{tab} root=/dev/hda1 ro
Then, to get it started, you type 'boot' as shown.
At least, that's been my experience. If you don't have a separate /boot partition, you might need to alter this line accordingly:
kernel /vmlinu<tab>
Error 17: Cannot mount the selected partition
kernel /boot/vmlinu<tab>
Error 17: Cannot mount the selected partition
It looks like it's time to start over. I was just getting ndiswrapper going to try and use my wireless card and get online. Oh well, I hope I took good notes! Thanks for everyone's help, I did learn a bit more about the evironment though.
kernel /vmlinu<tab>
Error 17: Cannot mount the selected partition
kernel /boot/vmlinu<tab>
Error 17: Cannot mount the selected partition
It looks like it's time to start over. I was just getting ndiswrapper going to try and use my wireless card and get online. Oh well, I hope I took good notes! Thanks for everyone's help, I did learn a bit more about the evironment though.
I got to this thread after researching for a solution to the same problem/symptom. FWIW, I was able to correct the problem by booting from the FC CD, going into rescue mode and issuing the command fsck -y /dev/hda1
The fsck fixed many problems on hda1, after which I was able to reboot the system correctly.
My original problem occurred after the machine was powered of without being shutdown cleanly.
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