I have a system which came with Windows 2000. Awhile ago, I added a second harddrive and installed Redhat 9 onto it. GRUB was installed as part of the Redhat installation and it worked great allowing me to select either OS to boot to. However, I just re-installed Windows (and converted its drive to NTFS in the process), and after the Windows install completed, GRUB no longer ran and I could only boot to Windows. I did have a Linux boot diskette which allowed me to boot to Redhat 9, so I did so and tried installing GRUB again using the command '/sbin/grub-install /dev/hda'. Now, when I boot the system, I get what appears to be a GRUB error:
"Booting 'Red Hat Linux 2.4.20-31.9'
root hd0,2
Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0xf
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-31.9 ro root=LABEL=/
Error 17: Cannot mount selected partition
Press any key to continue."

The entire rest of the screen (outside the bounds of the above message text) is filled with some unknown graphic character. If I press a key to continue, then my old GRUB menu appears but is almost unreadable because it appears on top of a screen full of vertical lines. If, I select Windows 2000 in the list, then it will successfully boot to my updated Windows drive. However, if I select 'Red Hat Linux 2.4.20-31.9' then I get the same error as shown above again. I seem to have several problems:

a) It seems to initially attempt to boot directly into Red Hat 9, and only presents
the GRUB menu when that fails - I want the GRUB menu first so I have the chance to pick which OS to boot to.
b) It is unable to boot into Red Hat 9 at all (but I can still get to it from my boot diskette)
c) GRUB now has some kind of weird display problem so that it is almost unreadable (however, if I select Windows 2000, then it boots fine and has no residual display problem.

Any suggestions on how I can solve these problems and get GRUB to again correctly boot to either 'Windows 2000' or 'Red Hat 9' after prompting me?

In case it might be of use, my original grub.conf file contained the following entries:
- Red Hat Linux (2.4.20-31.9)
root (hd0,2)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-31.9 ro root=LABEL=/
initrd /initrd-2.4.20-31.9.img
- Windows 2000
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

Also, my Linux boot disk which works has the following in its syslinux.cfg file:
default linux
prompt 1
display boot.msg
timeout 100
label linux
kernel vmlinuz
append initrd=initrd.img ro root=/dev/hdc5

TIA

Your grub.conf and the boot disk don't agree where your / is located.
The grub says it's on the first drive, second partition.
"root (hd0,2)"

and the disk says it's on hdc5
"append initrd=initrd.img ro root=/dev/hdc5"

If you can get into the Redhat system with the disk, then run the command: [B]rdev[B] to find out just where the system is located. Then you can edit the grub.config to match.
Then rerun the grub-install command.

If you can't get into the Redhat system with your boot disk, use CD#1 and start with the command: linux rescue

root (hd0,2) does not refer to the root but to /BOOT partition and is the third partition well alllegedly
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...troubleshooter

i prefer you post your /etc/fstab to be sure but it could be

title linux
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda5
initrd /boot/initrd.img

title xp
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1