Accessing an orphaned FC6 installation
 

I had my system installed with XP on the Primary Master HD and FC6 on the Secondary Master HD. It was happily using grub on the Primary drive MBR to boot XP/FC6. Now the Primary drive has failed (tell tale clunking noise from drive and not bootable any more), so my question is, how do I access the perfectly good FC6 installation on the other drive now that there's no boot loader?

Ideally I'd like to just create a boot floppy for now without changing the files or setup on the second drive, so that when I get my new primary drive, I can put things back as they were.

Regards,

Richard.

Probably the easiest thing to do is to boot into a live CD that has GRUB (such as KNOPPIX) and use it to create a generic boot floppy that at boot will get you to the GRUB command line. Use that to boot FC6 and then use the utility (mkbootdisk?) FC6 provides to create a boot floppy. You can get a little fancier and use GRUB to create a floppy that will boot directly into FC6, and then you are done. :)

Another alternative if you do not have a seperate partition for /boot, is to boot into a live CD, or maybe even from your install disk if it has a rescue mode, mount your FC6 partition and chroot to that partition and run mkbootdisk (or whatever your utitlity is called). I think you should be able to this even if you have a seperate /boot partition, but it gets messier. And one time when I tried something similar I ran into problems -- I quit before I solved them.

I've managed to get into FC6 via the install CD as you suggested by runniing "linux rescue" at the boot prompt.

I've yet to find the FC6 equivalent of mkbootdisk though. I'll have another look later when I've got more time.

Thanks for the pointers.

Richard.

In the old RH distros, mkbootdisk was a script in /sbin. A quick consultation with Google leads me to believe there is something in FC6 with the same name, but I have no experience with it.

I forgot to mention in my first post that if you use chroot you need to make sure you mount your partition w/o the nodev option. At least that is the way it used to be before the days of udev (which is the way devices are handled on newer 2.6 kernels.). I don't know what, if any, kinks udev throws into this procedure.

Good luck.

After booting with the Fedora rescue system and running the chroot command as displayed can you just run "grub-install /dev/fd0" to create a boot floppy?

Hi guys, sorry for the delay in getting back to you, had some other stuff to deal with, but now back to sort out my PC.

I tried the method of installing grub to the floppy and that worked fine, though I did have some problems in doing it.

When I first tried it, I typed "grub-install /dev/fd0" and got an error saying;

A quick Google revealed that there was a missing entry for fd0 in /boot/grub/device.map. It only contained hd0, so after adding it (and trying to remember the commands for using VIM) I re-ran grub-install and it worked fine.

Now I can just pop the floppy in the drive and boot into FC6.

Though I have not tried the method of using mkbootdisk, I have confirmed that it does reside in /sbin as blackhole54 suggested. I think I may be missing a path reference though because when I just type mkbootdisk from the root prompt it tells me that it doesn't exist.

Thank you both for your assistance. Now I just need to sort out my XP drive :-)

Richard.