Hello All,
One of my linux boxes recently decided to go on a little vacation and I am hoping someone here can help me pull it back.

I have an AMD processor and am using Fedora 9 and one day it decided not to boot.

It looks like it starts to load grub and stops. It says GRUB and just sits there. (which is not the grub prompt: grub>). I have tried a couple of things but nothing has worked yet. I booted into rescue mode with the dvd and examined the grub.conf which looked good. I looked at the contents of the /boot directory and /boot/grub directory and they seemed to have the files I would expect. I did a chroot /mnt/sysimage and that gave me access to my data. At some later point I did that again and copied my data to another external disk so at least I have my data. I have also attached my disk into another linux box and performed an fsck on the boot partition, which had no effect. I didn't know what else to do in rescue mode and I don't know what to do next.

Since I have my data on another disk I could just do a reinstall but I am hoping there is another easier option that won't disrupt my configuration.

More history that might be relevant but probably not. The hardware is about 1 year old (let's call it new). It is an AMD 64 bit dual processor. It has been running FC 8 for quite awhile and recently I switched to FC 9. I normally allow yum to automatically update my machine. Recently, with the last 2 weeks, I fixed some configuration issues that the auto log report suggested. Those exact emails are the box that doesn't boot but the messages were in the lines of run git update and git --fix-install, unfortunately I can't say for sure that it was git, it might have been another command but the suggested operations were update and fix install.

OK. I think that is it.
Thanks in advance for any advice or suggestions
-brian

It has to do with your bios detecting your hardware in a different order, this is causing your /etc/fstab to no longer be accurate.

Whats happening is that the pointer on the MBR that points to grub cant actually find your /boot partition.

You can either use a live cd and mount the drive/partition with the / partition and edit the /etc/fstab to match while switching your fstab to use UUID rather than devices (such as /dev/sda1) this make sure this wont happen again.

The other thing you can do is mess with your bios settings and get the computer to recognize the hardware in the same order as before.

Good luck.

Go to terminal and as root enter 'fdisk -l' without the quotes, the results will let us see your partitions.

Thanks for the tips Scubanator and Larry,
I will give your suggestions a shot. I don't remember manipulatimg the Bios settings. I really do not understand them very well and generally leave them alone. Question becomes How did the Bios settings change?

And Larry my disk is partioned as done by the Redhat installer. The first partition, the boot partition, is about 100 M and is type ext2 or 3 and is mounted at /dev/sda1. The second partition is /dev/sda2 and is type LVM. This is a single boot machine with one single 500 G hard disk.

If you have a grub prompt or live linux cd boot and at the grub promt type

root (hd0,1)
setup (hd0)
boot

scubanator,
I tried to boot again with the rescue disk and I discovered that the fstab file is using UUIDs. At the shell prompt I typed mount and it showed UUID=<...> /boot ext3 defaults 1 2

if I chroot /mnt/sysimage then type mount I see
/dev/sda1 on /mnt/sysimage/boot type ext3 (rw, relatime, errors=continue, user_xattr, acl, data=ordered)


Larry,
I never get as far as the grub prompt. My screen says GRUB (all in capitals) but it never progress to the grub prompt which is grub>

Did you try to re-install GRUB from the Original CD? I use SuSE which comes with a repair mode on the CD which can recognize a pre-existing GRUB use its menu.lst and repair the installation. Fedora should be able to do the same I'd guess.

Brian: It took me awhile to find this thread after several google searches. The symptoms you describe are EXACTLY what has happened to my FC9 install after a routine yum update last Thursday using the Gnome Packagekit UI. That update included several packages which required reboot after completion of the update (e.g. kernel, bug fixes). I was busy with work however and didn't reboot until many hours later. I doubt if this really has anything to do with the problem but thought it was worth a mention. When I finally did the reboot, the exact symptoms that you describe occurred to me. I haven't been able to get it back up and have been working on my laptop ever since.

This thread ends without a definite conclusion. Were you ever successful at recovering your system without re-installing? If so, how did you do so?

Thanks

I have had the same symptoms, but not the same origin of the issue. I installed opensuse 11 but didn't want to install grub on my first harddrive, sda, but installed it on sdc. This results in the showing of GRUB on the screen.
I haven't found a solution, and I have to admit, I have no clue why i didn't want to install grub on sda, so I just did that, and everything works fine.

I am, however, interested in the solution, and curious whether you have solved it? I guess I should have changed the fstab thingy, but I'm not a very skillful linux user yet.

lennard

It's happened the same boot problem to me too leaving Win xp in hd 1 and installing Fedora 9 Gnome 2.22 in hd 3 and i fixed it recovering win mbr by win recovery console with fixmbr and then with fixboot,then simply following fedora dvd instruction to install a new version of grub..now everything works well and just now i'm writing from fedora within firefox 3 beta 5

I hope it works for you too.

Good luck !

Hi All,
First: apologies for all of those who have been following this thread and waiting for an update. I have been away on vacation and my computer has been a low priority.

First thing I did was to get my computer working using a spare disk and a new install. Doing that got me working and left my data in tact. I also figured out how to copy my data to my newly installed disk. With that I am fully functional but the problem remains and is waiting for me to address it.

My spare disk is much smaller but is big enough to hold my data but too small for what I need. I still want my original drive to work and I don't want to do a complete reformat/reinstall. I have been hoping there is a magic bullet that would fix it all.

One suggestion was to reinstall grub from the cd. I couldn't figure out how to mount the cd when it was in rescue mode so I copied the grub rpm onto a usb key drive and reinstalled it from the key drive. Didn't help unfortunately. I don't know what else to try. I am wondering if I were to copy /boot directory onto a key drive and then copy that onto the disk in question. Admittedly that is just grasping at straws, which is all I have left at this point.

Every poster in this thread needs to remember one thing, we need the correct information that we ask for to try and help. Did any of you use a live cd and post the results of
'fdisk -l' from using terminal (or konsole) as root. userbrian tells me he has a disk with two partitions, how many hds do you have and how are they labeled? If you can not get on the internet with the live cd then try to write it down word for word and post it from a different computer. It is frustrating when you are trying to help then you find out the person has two or more hds, six partitions, or this is the third, fourth, etc distro they are installing.

Hi Larry,
I am attaching my fstab file in case it offers any clues and I am also attaching some output from fdisk. Unfortunately it is not for the disk I am having problems with. I booted with the faulty disk in rescue mode captured fdisk data to a file. Replaced the disk, rebooted and discovered the file is empty. Damn!.


fdisk output from my functional disk. (Faulty disk is same except for identifiers and size of sda2 ).


Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000e658a

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 25 200781 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 26 19457 156087540 8e Linux LVM



My fstab file
UUID=4625133e-aa21-4f3e-8b1e-462b7a2487b8 / ext3 defaults 1 1
UUID=05594ea6-b41a-4afc-b001-1f518b263a1c /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
192.168.1.77:/share/hdd/data /mnt/slug nfs auto,rw,user,hard,exec,intr 0 0
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 swap swap defaults 0 0

If you are going to repair grub you need to have a grub boot cd or a live linux distro that uses grub as boot. The only other option that I know of is a new install. I suggest you download 'Super Grub' boot iso. If you have a bootable system it will boot. It also gives you an option for an install to mbr.