Hi folks

I have a dual boot machine but I am currently only able to access XP... I am a complete n00b when it comes to Linux but had three months of bliss with RH9... I steadily got hooked until sudenly my system restarted one day with only a grub commandline prompt and an "error 18 ..." message.


I have tried various things since then but nothing seems to work... is there anything i can do to rescue the RH9 I have installed???

c

try the recovering bootloader page at

http://masand.sourceforge.net/linux/myhelpages.html

regards

Try booting with the first CD of RH9. Or with the boot floppy if you have one. If not, make one in Windows. Using a program called RAWRITE.

Anyway.

You can try getting in RH9 through GRUB.

type these commands in GRUB (you can't mess anything up)

find /boot/grub/grub.conf
or
find /grub/grub.conf

One of these will return some info like (hd0,0) or so

root (hd0,0)
instead of hd0,0 put whatever you got from the find command.

Then you must choose a kernel, like this:

kernel vmlinu (press TAB a couple of times to get the available kernels and type one in)

then you must choose an initrd image, like this:

initrd init (press TAB a couple of times to get the available initrd images and type one in)

here you should be ready to boot your RH9.
Use the command

boot

Happy days are back!


Anyway you get back to linux, login as root and in the console, type:

/sbin/grub-install /dev/hda

You should be fine. If not, post here.

Hi Folks

Wow this problem is really dragging on!

I have since i overwritten RH9 with RH Fedora and part of that process reinstalled Grub. Thinking the problem was solved I rebooted only to find that now grub crashes.... no commandline prompt... nothing!

I suspect there is a prblem with the MBR... Is there anyway I can fix it?

C

It could be that grub is just corrupted in the MBR. You can use fedora CD to reinstall grub. Type grub-install to do this. Also you can use Knoppix to do the same.

Boot from fedora rescue CD and run /sbin/grub-install /dev/hda to install GRUB to MBR.