Now on boot screen I get

mount local filesystem (failed)

I made a mistake and typed:

setup (hd1) instead of (hd0)

Everything works great anyway.

I tried:

(1) rescue for 2.6.27.9-73.fc9.i686
(2) chroot /mnt/sysimage

(3) umount /dev/sdb1
(4) fsck /dev/sdb1 rebooted and got same message

I have dual boot
SCSI 0 XP Prof SP3 sda1
SCSI 1 Fedora 9 sdb1

What about setup (hd0)? Can you get to a Live CD and then press C to get to a GRUB command prompt, then just type in setup (hd0) to place the boot loader on the zero (first) disk? Assuming there are entries out there in your GRUB menu and the boot loader is still present, that may be enough.

If not, you can use other GRUB command entries to locate partitions, and if necessary, create menu entries to access them. Unless you also removed some software, you should still have XP on sda1 and Fedora on sdb1.

You can get at them interactively this way if things are not too badly messed up:

title Windows XP on disk 1
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

title Fedora on disk 2
root (hd1,0)
chainloader +1

Put these entries into the /boot/grub/menu.lst file when you can get at it. In the meantime, you need not enter a title line - it is just for display in the menu. Use the chainloader to get to one system or the other. They should both still be there, unless other unintended things have also happened.

You can also search for actual partitions and actual files by doing the following:

Enter GRUB interactively, as suggested above.

For the root line, enter root, then enter a ( and press Tab. A list of device types will appear - hopefully hd would be one of them. Put in hd and press Tab again. Now you should see which disks are available. I would expect to see 0 and 1, based on your description. Select either 0 or 1 and press Tab again. Now you should see the available disk partitions for the disk that you chose.

You can do the same thing if you want to manually create your own boot and initrd lines in GRUB interactively. This is a great way to get your menus right - first figure out where things are interactively, then note them and add the correct entries into GRUB once you have access to the /boot/grub/menu.lst GRUB menu.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html is the definitive GRUB manual. It might be intimidating for the newcomer, but it certainly is comprehensive. Ask any questions and I would be glad to help out.

by doing the right: setup (hd0)

otherwise my grub would not be working

The problem now is the local filesystem not grub

I still have the

mounting local filesystems (failed)

message at boot

As I said lots of complicated things are working.

Oracle 11g1
MySQL 5.0.51a
. . . .

I thought fsck would repair the problem.

Somewhere I read that Linux filesystems self repair after so many boots.

In that case, I would open a console terminal, become root (su, sux, etc.) and then run the command mount -a and see what comes up.

I suspect that some mount point is incorrect. If by some chance the UUID is incorrect, you can find out which UUID values are correct for each partition by running the command blkid from root. If you put the results in a file, such as blkid > /root/blkid.txt, you can then use a text editor and modify /etc/fstab accordingly, should that actually be the problem.

If that is not it, I need more information. Hard to figure out what is going on based on your description.

thanks!

LMKIII (root) ~ [1000]>blkid
/dev/sda1: UUID="94FC1F8BFC1F6730" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sdb1: LABEL="/boot" UUID="d22bdaa7-ca74-4bbf-8233-21d0b8e5d227" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00: UUID="9ebe068e-a80d-4022-9649-93133d99d996" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol01: TYPE="swap" UUID="8d82b046-7c6e-4571-b0fc-02eedf3ffac4"
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00: UUID="9ebe068e-a80d-4022-9649-93133d99d996" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01: TYPE="swap" UUID="8d82b046-7c6e-4571-b0fc-02eedf3ffac4"
/dev/sdc1: UUID="192C-010B" TYPE="vfat"
/dev/sdd1: UUID="66AB-3026" TYPE="vfat"
/dev/sde1: UUID="0000-0000" TYPE="vfat"
/dev/sdb2: UUID="BShy3c-1zwa-zPXd-yolv-ufgM-zNCW-s1bZur" TYPE="lvm2pv"

I have 2 flash memory drives plugged into a 5 port USB extender card

LMKIII (root) ~ [1001]>cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>

tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
#Entry for /dev/sdb1 :
UUID=d22bdaa7-ca74-4bbf-8233-21d0b8e5d227 /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
#Entry for /dev/sda1 :
UUID=DC70F0AD70F0900E /media/sda1 ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 swap swap defaults 0 0