grub won't load fedora 4, rescue disk says partition is unformatted!
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grub won't load fedora 4, rescue disk says partition is unformatted!
Hi friendly linux folk,
here's the pickle:
I've got GRUB prompt, and Fedora Core 4 won't boot. I need to have someone walk me through using GRUB. I can load Windows XP using the chainloader thing, but that's useless to me.
My partitions (on an i686):
hd0,0=bios
hd0,1=windows
hd0,2=linux swap
hd0,3=fedora 4
I've tried using the fedora rescue CD (no floppy drive), and it gives me a command prompt, or if i try to get to the upgrade section of the CD, it tells me that the partition with linux on it has not been formatted.
i've tried google, the wiki/man pages, etc. I'm lost. I know this is probably really simple because I have not changed the grub.conf file.
When you say that you are getting a grub prompt, are you getting:
grub_
--OR--
grub>
It sounds like you are getting the grub shell (grub>) that will allow you to do a native grub installation. If so, then run through the find, root and setup commands like this:
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
which will probably output (hd0,3). Then run root:
grub> root (hd0,3)
or using whatever “find” found instead of (hd0,3). Then run setup:
Something must really be messed up with your installation, if neither “find /boot/grub/stage1” or “find /grub/stage1” found anything. About now, I usually get out my Knoppix CD, boot the system with it and have a look around.
BTW, if FC4 is installed in a logical partition within the extended partition, then it would need to be in hd0,4 or greater. The first logical partition is numbered as 5, whereas all primary/extended partitions are numbered 1-4.
Yes, those are the good-old Dell utilities in hda1.
It looks like hda3 is /boot. While you are in linux rescue mode, try running these commands and tell me, more or less, the first few things that are listed at the two ls command steps:
mkdir /mnt/temp
mount -t ext3 /dev/hda3 /mnt/temp
cd /mnt/temp
ls
cd grub
ls
cd /
umount /mnt/temp
If the mount step fails, try running:
e2fsck -f /dev/hda3
and see if there are problems with the filesystem.
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