Hi,


I had setup "dual booting". The first OS is Windows XP Pro SP 2 and the second OS is RHEL 5. The system was running fine until yesterday when I started it up and selected Windows XP from the Grub Page there was an error indicating that a system file was missing or corrupted under ...\system32\ and suggested that the problem could be fixed by booting from the CD of XP and selecting the recovery option (r). So, I did that. However, after the boot process I was presented with the partitions list and was to selected C to install Windows. I am not sure why the recovery option was not presented. Well, I installed Windows again and so Grub was gone.

To reinstall Grub I did this:

Booted the system from RHEL5 DVD:

Rebooted the system and the Grub Page was there but Linux could not be started up.

I checked the file /etc/grub.conf and changed the partition number in root (hd0,x) and wherever required. But I forgot what partition number it was there before.

So, how can I determine which partition holds the startup files, i.e. the root partition of Linux while Linux is running in rescue mode?

The command e2label didn't seem to work (though I didn't try it last night).

Well, if you happen to have read one of my previous threads you might guess that my system is messing up after Linux crashed the other day and I reinstalled it again and again. (Now, Windows also seemed to be closed so I opened it forcefully!)

You can get your partition information by running the command: fdisk -l (Lower case Letter L) as root user, use any Linux Live CD. It's difficult to give specific advice without this information, how many drives/partitions? Do you have a separate boot partition? Post the fdisk output here and someone should be able to help you.

Hi,


I did that yesterday and today in the evening also. Somehow I was able to fix the problem and got the system ready. Well, I will post my findings here in some minutes.

Thanks!

From linux rescue mode:

So, I edited the /etc/grub.conf file and changed the entry for parition number from whatever it was to (hd0,hd7), (hd0,hd8), and then (hd0,hd9) as those were the only Linux paritions as shown above. But none of them worked. So, I typed in (hd0,hd6) this time and it worked. I figured out that the first parition is internally or logically numbered 0 so (hd0,hdx) should be (hd0,hd6) in the grub.conf.

I tried this to figure out which parition holds the root (/) parition:


By the way, could you explain me what those "ID" values indicate?

You found out that Grub counts from zero (0) not from one (1). The Grub numbers will always be one less than fdisk output.

ID numbers like 83, 82?? Filesystem type.

I studied it today. Thanks, anyways!