Greetings!

I hope this is the best group for this. (If not, any administrator, feel free to move it!) :-)

(I almost did hardware, but it's not really a hardware question, though I am not positive my hardware is good!) :-O

Here's the situation: I personally destroyed the 450 MHz Pentium II motherboard by putting the black plastic piece of a new heat sink I had purchased for it BETWEEN THE CPU AND THE HEAT SINK. :-( (Entirely my fault.)

I just picked up my Linux system. The man put a new motherboard and a Celeron CPU in it.

Because it was the CPU I destroyed, I was thinking and hoping that my drives and PCI bus cards were all still okay. Therefore, because of a SERIOUS lack of time right now (my mother has Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus and lives with me, she had a shunt implanted in her brain in March of last year and she is so much better it is both wonderful and hard to believe, but I still have to do a lot for her, and she and my job are my top 2 priorities that take pretty well all of my time, and I am very behind on many truly important things), I was hoping to still find the Fedora 4 Linux that I installed in October of 2005 to still be good.

It currently boots (faster than it used to, for the few messages that show up before/at the BIOS, etc.) and goes to grub.

I haven't been successful at getting grub to find my file.

For example, "root (hd0,0)" indicates "Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83" but then a "kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.13-9 ro root=LABEL=/1 rhgb quiet" says "File not found".

Looking at printouts I made (in October, 2005 after installing the Fedora), /boot is on /dev/sda1. Looking at a dmesg, I see after "Kernel command line:" the "ro root=LABEL=/1 rhgb quiet"

I AM NOT POSITIVE that what I've given root is correct, so that is one definite thing of which I'm NOT sure.

However, I've tried giving hd0, hd1 and h2 and if I give hd3 I get "Selected disk does not exist" and that is encouraging to me.

I have 3 hard drives. I had 2 SCSI disks (sda and sdb) and I installed a larger IDE drive (/dev/hdc) right before I installed this Fedora.

Trying other partitions (such as "root (hd0,2)" gives me "No such partition" instead of something like "Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83", so that is also encouraging to me. (But, I've tried all kinds of partition numbers, too.)

I am certain the file I want to use is /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.13-9" and had I gotten to the initrd, I am certain the file I would have wanted to try was /boot/initrd.img (which is a symbolic link to the 2.6.13 img file).

I already have a message on the Fedora Forum which started with someone indicating that a Pentium 4 (or Celeron, it turned out to be) should work with what I had installed while having a Pentium II. And, Friday night, I posted a message similar to this one there, but I haven't heard anything yet.

I'm hoping that since this involves grub perhaps this forum has a broader readership, because that isn't specific to a particular distribution of Linux, so that is why I'm also coming to this forum for help.

This grub doesn't have the "ls" command that I have read about in a manual for the newer version of grub. If there is some way that grub could just tell me a few files in the partition, I would be able to positively identify that I have the correct (/boot) partition and my wonder and being unsure about what I'm giving root isn't correct wouldn't be a question, anymore.

This Linux system does a HUGE amount for me, and I REALLY WANT its functionality back -- and I was thinking this would be less time on me than setting up a brand new distribution and getting everything from a backup -- at least everything up to a few days before I "fried" the old CPU! :-O

If anyone can help me, I would appreciate your help. Ask questions if I failed to provide something important.

Thank you very much! :-)
Barry

The first thing that I would do is to boot a live Linux CD and make a current backup of the data. Then I would consider trying to chroot into the installed system and run the GRUB installer. The exact details depend on which version of GRUB you are running.

You should also include the name and version of the distribution that you are using when you ask questions.

Seems fairly specific.
I prefer to let grub do the legwork. From command mode try "gemoetry (hd0)" to ensure you are actually looking at the correct disk (presuming the partition info will tell you).
Then "configfile /grub/menu.lst" - try "configfile /boot/grub/menu.lst" if that fails.
Once you find the configfile, simply "b" to boot it.

Thank you both for replying so quickly!

I have GREAT news! As of about a couple of hours ago, I have my Linux back!

Stress junkie, I realize my first message was rather long, but I did indicate I am using Fedora Core 4.

Syg00, indeed on the backups! I have 2 separate USB hard drives, and a backup is done to the SimpleTech drive every Saturday and to the Western Digital drive every Tuesday; a full backup the first (Saturday/Tuesday) of the month and a differential thereafter.

I got a new motherboard, and so I had to "rebuild" X-Windows and my networking on the motherboard didn't work, but since I only need one port (at least, right now) I am using a PCI network card.

At the moment, I have my Linux back and have spent the last couple of hours catching up on things, and it is wonderful!

I have been replying with JEO at the Fedora Forum in the End Of Live forum.

Thank you both (again) for your replies! This is solved, working and can be closed! Thankfully! :-)

Barry