Hallo all,

i'm a complete newcomer to the linux world and have a problem, that i can't seem to solve. When booting up, my pc only goes as far as 'loading grub stage2' and the presents me with a console type screen. If i hit the tab button i get a list of commands that i can use. Unfortunately i don't know the syntax of any of them!! How can i get my pc to start again, or am i about to have to reformat everything :-(

Mark

I am more familiar with booting up Linux from LILO than with Grub and am not an expert at either bootloader. So anyway, is does it give you a line that ends in the # key or in the $ key? Is it asking for your username and password. If not then try typing in ls and press enter? What happens when you press pwd and press enter? Linux is case sensitive so try those commands in lower case just like I showed them. What happens when you type startx? What happens if you type reboot or if you type shutdown -h now?

Were there any error messages at any point? If so what did they say ? Which Linux distribution are you using? As I mentioned I am less familiar with GRUB. But, with LILO I have found that a badly configured fstab file can drop me off at the command line in an unusual emergency sort of way. From there I was able to edit my fstab file and correct the problem.

With most versions of Linux you can choose whether it should boot up into a command line interface or into a point and click graphcial interface similar to Windows. Are you sure that you are not just looking at the normal CLI interface that some people prefer (don't ask why)? The part where you said you could hit tab and get a list of commands puzzles me a little? I have not seen that before. Before booting up into Linux did the Grub bootloader give you a choice between Windows and Grub? Can you still boot up into Windows?

Hallo Rick,

first off thanx for the quick response :-)

i am using Suse Linux professional 8.1. There are no error messages as far as i can tell. It is definately not the CLI, because i cannot switch back to any gui view. What i see is a line telling me how much mem is being used and a prompt ' grub >', that's all.

if i type reboot, the pc reboots to the same point. If i type 'password' and type in the root password at the prompt i get the message ' password needs to be authenticated', and it's back to the prompt once more :-(

As for windows, no, i can't boot anything anymore :-(

I have Suse 8.1 installed on my old computer but have not used it as much as the varisous versions of Red Hat. I am using my newer computer and using Red Hat 9 at the moment. So anyway did you want to try typeing in several simple commands? I should tell you what they do.

If you type ls and press return it should list what is in the current directory. If you do that more than once it should do the same thing each time.

If you type df it should list what partitions are currently mounted.

You said you pressed tab and a list of commands appeard. What were a few of the commands? I see that you did type reboot and it did reboot? That is one of the normal commands and if it works others probably work as well? Let me know what happens when you try that. I will be here a little longer tonight. I am not yet sleepy.

Just after making the above post I noticed that you are no longer logged in and you were a couple of minutes ago. So I am going to go ahead and log off. This web site's web pages are loading very slowly the last few minutes and is not worth using at the moment anyway. There is only one other person logged on at the moment. Good luck!

Hi Rick,

i'm at work at the moment and have no access to my pc. I will try those commands later. Here are a few of the commands that i get:

root, md5crypt, vbeprobe, reboot, kernel, boot, chainloader, install, rootnoverify etc.

Hope this helps

Mark

you are in the grub cl not the shell so shell commands might give you funny responses. It sounds like there's an error in your stage 2 grub. This is from the gentoo documentation but it might get things working:

(I'm assuming you have a grub> prompt)
grub> root (hd0,0)
This tells grub where your boot partition is. hd0 equals hda, hd1 is hdb etc. The second zero means one. So root (hd0,0) says to boot hda1.

grub>setup (hd0)
Installs grub on the mbr.

I think you can type
grub>edit kernel or grub>edit boot

and it will let you edit your grub file. ONce edited, you can type boot. If you fixed everything, it should boot for you.

for running windows:

that is assuming your windows partition is on hda (primary master, first partiton - adjust the numbers accordingly)

then

then

then

that's a 4-step way in grub prompt to boot windows. Good luck!