After a misconfiguration of a newly installed linux kernel, my Debian Etch server stopped booting due to a grub problem. After booting using a live CD I fixed the grub (so I thought) by fixing the menu.lst and installing grub. However, I always get the grub> boot. I can boot into linux using the following commands at the grub prompt:

root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1
initrd /initrd.img
boot

works perfectly. So I would think that calling

setup (hd0) (hd0,0) after the above commands would work, but it doesn't? I always get the grub prompt after boot again.

When booted in linux (using the commands above) I run

grub-install /dev/hda

But this also doesn't work, it still gives me the grub prompt??

Could it be that I have accidentally ran grub-install /dev/hda1 instead of grub-install /dev/hda? And how should I recover?

Any help appreciated!

Try it this way

I've tried that as well. Unfortunately it doesn't fix the problem. Could the problem be that I've run both grub-install /dev/hda and grub-install /dev/hda1?

Where exactly are the different stages of grub installed? Are these all on the MBR?

And how should I completely remove the grub loader? fdisk /MBR fixes the MBR, but what about the grub stage on /dev/hda1 (or is this the same)?

Btw, I have only one harddrive in the system, with two partitions, a linux partition (dev/hda1) and a swap partition (/dev/hda2)

I've solved the problem.

Turned out that my stage files were broken. I downloaded the latest grub sources and rebuild the stage files (stage1, e2fs_stage1.5, stage2) and put them into my grub folder. Reinstalled grub and now all is swell again!

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