Hello, everyone. I'm not a Linux guy, so I hope you'll forgive that. I've got a fairly serious problem that I haven't been able to make any progress on despite a lot of great leads from previous posts on the forum.

I'm running an ESX server and after rebuilding an array after a drive failure, Linux seems to be hanging at the GRUB "boot" command. No error, no message, /var/messages doesn't report anything, just a blinking cursor. The "kernel" and "initrd" commands seem successful (presumably so, as there are no error messages from those commands).

I've:
- Recreated grub.conf using esxcfg-boot
- Manually executed the "root", "kernel", "initrd", and "boot" commands
- Checked permissions on the kernel and initrd files
- Verified that those files were there
- Substituted the GUID with root=/dev/sda1
- Manually mounted the filesystems in the root and boot partitions after booting into Knoppix and verified that they were accessible

I'm presuming that there's a problem with executing either the kernel or initrd files that were loaded into memory, but have no idea how to verify that or where to go next.

Is there somewhere I can view the status of the "boot" command? GRUB doesn't seem to have its own log file, at least not in /boot/grub.

I'd appreciate any help or direction you all can provide. Thanks in advance.

Jeff

Lots of presumptions there.
grub loads a hard loop if it can't find its stage files - errors after that raise an error code. Probably what has happened is that the rebuild has placed them at different relative sector locations (than originally).
Run grub-install /dev/sda (or applicable) should fix it. Can also be fixed using grub subcommands directly (say from Knoppix).

I'll give that a try. I figured that GRUB was fine since root, kernel, and initrd all seemed to run fine. I'll post back with status. In the meantime anybody else have any ideas?

Ok, no joy after reinstalling grub. The grub messages changed a bit before the menu came up, but after selection the same problem reoccurs.

Is there a way to show debug or log messages for grub? Any help is appreciated!

Jeff...

You did not indicate which distribution of Linux you are using.
Don't know what esx is (doesn't matter though).
Don't know what "rebuilding" constituted in your case.
Very few distribution use "grub.conf" anymore and mostly that file is just a link to "menu.lst", might check that.
You didn't post the output of 'fdisk -l' so we don't know your partition info.
Don't know what's in your menu.lst file.
Don't know how many drives you have or whether you have separate boot partition.
In your first post, you indicated that you got no error messages and in your last post you say ; which is it? If you got error messages, what were they?