Hello all,

Out of nowhere my RH9 system has developed a problem. I was bringing up the system and I see the message "GRUB loading stage2" and the next thing I know I'm in the grub program itself. No error message or anything. It just dumps me in the GRUB program without going through the normal boot/load sequence (which it's been doing for about 3 years now flawlessly).

This is a 686 PC with only RH9 installed on it. I didn't change anything that I'm aware of or install any new hardware, etc. I did boot up the rescue disk and get a shell and I can see all of my files and such so it's not a total loss. But I'm hoping I can repair whatever it is that has decided to barf on me.

I've looked around and searched these forums but haven't found anything I see as helpful for my situation.

Anybody know what's wrong? What caused this? Why am I dumped into the GRUB interactive shell? Why don't I get some sort of error message or dump log? Did I loose part of my hard drive or something? Please, oh, please tell me there's a way to fix this.

Thanks for reading!

Could you post your grub.conf, I realize it may be difficult since the system is not booting. Use a live cd such as knoppix to access your partitions

OK, I booted into 'linux resuce' mode, when to /mnt/sysimage/etc and found a listing for grub.conf
which was a link to ../boot/grub/grub.conf. Went to the
boot/grub directory and found that it was empty!!!

Could this be a wee bit of a problem?

On another identical RH9 system I see device.map, grub.conf, menu.lst, splash.xpm.gz, stage1, stage2 and a bunch of *_stage1_5 files.

Is there any way I can get anaconda to recreate the contents of my now empty /boot/grub directory? Would it be possible to make use of the grub files on my working system to help me out?

Any ideas on who or what erased all my grub files?

Thanks for the help!

I'm uncertain about the path to the grub files (/mnt/sysimage/etc). When you boot in rescue mode, can you see your filesystem tree? If so, go directly to /boot/grub and see what is there. empty?---how about /boot?

If the files are really missing, you may be able to copy them from another installation.

If you don't have too much custom stuff installed, you might want to re-install or simply upgrade to a more modern distro---eg FC5

The resuce mode makes the existing filesystem available but rooted from /mnt/sysimage. So I've seen that all of my files and such are still there where they should be.

The problem seems to be that all of the files that are in /boot/grub (which is mounted in resuce mode as /mnt/sysimage/boot/grub) are gone. Now that you mention it, I've just checked /boot (i.e. /mnt/sysimage/boot) and all the files are gone there as well! Little wonder that my system won't boot

So what would trash the entire boot directory? Is there any way I can get /boot (all files and subdirs) repopulated? Or should I just simply tar up the contents of the /boot directory on my working RH9 and put it on my bad system?

And this is a developmental legacy system supporting our product to customers. Luckily this should be our last release on RH9 and then we'll be migrating to FC5. But right now I need to get this system back online to continue development and release work. Thanks.

If you haven't done anything productive on this system since the install then I would just suggest you do a reinstall. It would probably take less time than other options

Unfortunately, there has been a lot of work on this system over the past 3+ years so reinstalling and the building our development environment (including Qt, Tcl, Tk, Tix, etc.) would take mucho hours. That will be my last option.

Since there was nothing in the /boot directory, I figured I had nothing to loose so I tarred up the /boot on our working system and untarred it on this system.

Began to boot just fine and then came to a screeching halt with the message "Warning: unable to open initial console".

I looked in /dev and there is only a tty but no ttyN listed.