Ok, here's my story.

I have a dual boot Windows XP and Gentoo Linux. Both OS's work perfectly, (as far as Windows possibly can) but I'm having a problem with grub.

My grub.conf is as follows:

#which listing to boot as default. 0 is the first, 1 the second etc.
default 1
# How many seconds to wait before the default listing is booted.
timeout 5
# Nice, fat splash-image to spice things up
# Comment out if you don't have a graphics card installed
splashimage=(hd0,2)/boot/splash.xpm.gz

# The next three lines are only if you dualboot with a Windows system.
# In this case, Windows is hosted on /dev/hda1.
title=Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

#title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.10-rc1
# Partition where the kernel image (or operating system) is located
#root (hd0,2)
#kernel /kernel-2.4.26-gentoo-r6 root=/dev/hda8

title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.10-rc1
root (hd0,2)
kernel (hd0,2)/kernel-2.6.10-rc1

#title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.7-gentoo-r11
# Partition where the kernel image (or operating system) is located
#root (hd0,2)
#kernel /kernel-2.4.26-gentoo-r6 root=/dev/hda8

title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.7-gentoo-r11
root (hd0,2)
kernel (hd0,2)/kernel-2.6.7-gentoo-r11 root=/dev/hda8


#title=Gentoo Linux 2.4.26-r6
# Partition where the kernel image (or operating system) is located
#root (hd0,2)
#kernel /kernel-2.4.26-gentoo-r6 root=/dev/hda8

title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.9-rc3
root (hd0,2)
kernel (hd0,2)/kernel-2.6.9-rc3 root=/dev/hda8

Now, when I boot my computer grub loads with:

grub>

at which point for Windows I enter:

root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
boot

for Linux I enter:

root (hd0,2)
kernel /kernel-2.6.10-rc1
boot

I can't understand where grub is having a problem with the conf file. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Gsee

Try this...
grub> root (hd0,2)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub>reboot

Well... that looked pretty... but still didn't fix it.

I did:

grub>root (hd0,2)
grub>setup (hd0)
this printed a fair bit of text - everything seemed to be ok as there was a 'done' at the end of every line and the process finished with 'completed'
grub> reboot

but I still came back to
grub>

Thanks for your quick reply
Gsee

Do you know what the actual partition layout is? You seem to have Windows on partition 1 and the Linux root on partition 3 ( hd0,2 ) so what is on partition 2 ( hd0,1 ) ?

I think from memory partition 2 (hd0,1) has another Windows Partition - I have 3 partitions for Windows - Windows, Temp, Data. Then Linux takes partition 3.

Gsee

Give us the output of:
Also, do you have a dedicated boot partition or not? The contents of /etc/fstab would also be interesting...

As per request:


/sbin/fdisk -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 637 5116671 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 638 7778 57360082+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda3 7779 7791 104422+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda5 638 892 2048256 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda6 893 2550 13317853+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda7 2551 2678 1028128+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda8 2679 6503 30724281 83 Linux
/dev/hda9 6504 7778 10241406 83 Linux


cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
# $Header: /home/cvsroot/gentoo-src/rc-scripts/etc/fstab,v 1.14 2003/10/13 20:03:38 azarah Exp $
#
# noatime turns off atimes for increased performance (atimes normally aren't
# needed; notail increases performance of ReiserFS (at the expense of storage
# efficiency). It's safe to drop the noatime options if you want and to
# switch between notail and tail freely.

# <fs> <mountpoint> <type> <opts> <dump/pass>

# NOTE: If your BOOT partition is ReiserFS, add the notail option to opts.
/dev/hda3 /boot ext2 defaults,noatime,noauto 1 2
/dev/hda8 / ext2 noatime 0 1
/dev/hda7 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,user 0 0
/dev/cdroms/cdrom1 /mnt/cdrom1 iso9660 noauto,user 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,user 0 0
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs defaults 0 0
/dev/uba1 /mnt/flash vfat
# Network shares
fileserver:/mnt/200Gig /mnt/network/fileserver nfs users,rw,rsize=8192,timeo=14,intr 0 0

# NOTE: The next line is critical for boot!
none /proc proc defaults 0 0

# glibc 2.2 and above expects tmpfs to be mounted at /dev/shm for
# POSIX shared memory (shm_open, shm_unlink).
# (tmpfs is a dynamically expandable/shrinkable ramdisk, and will
# use almost no memory if not populated with files)
# Adding the following line to /etc/fstab should take care of this:

none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0

Thanks for your help
Gsee

Ok, try this...
grub> root (hd0,7)
grub> setup (hd0,2)
grub>reboot

I tried that:

grub> root (hd0,7)
grub> setup (hd0,2) <- this step complained that it couldn't find the two files it was after
grub> reboot
came back with the same grub prompt.

Any other ideas?
Gsee

Running out of options here.
grub> root (hd0,7)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> reboot

negative....

the setup (hd0) step still reported that it couldn't find the two files.

gsee

Okay. Try playing around with the find command found in grub. ex.

And gives us what it lists. Also, what distro are you using?

Also, do:

and tell us what it says.

Err... silly idea, but try renaming grub.conf to menu.lst - you never know.

usually grub uses /boot/grub/menu.list not /etc/grub.conf I think Redhat started this.

woah... LQ stopped Emailing when I got a reply so I didn't see that there were new posts.
I'm about to go and try to use the FIND command.

I also have the menu.lst file in the same location as my grub.conf file

I'm using Gentoo Linux.

Gsee