borked my grub boot config and can no longer boot my old kernel

Jim Cornette jim-cornette at insight.rr.com
Sat Feb 21 15:45:40 UTC 2004


Matt wrote:
> Hi
> Just finished installing test1. I left the paritions for FC1
> well alone (hda2 - hda10) and installed test1 from hda11 and above. Upon
> reboot I found that the new grub menu no longer contained my FC1 kernel as
> a boot option. 
> 
> I think it was because I mistakenly (or more like brainlessly!) chose to
> write the test1 grub config to the MBR instead of the first sector?
> 
> So what can I do to get FC1 back on the menu? I booted to the FC1 with
> linux rescue but wasn't sure what do with the grub config to get it back.
> 
> Any words of wisdom would be much appreciated. :-)
> 

I run three versions on two different hard disks. When you install a new 
copy of Fedora or Redhat, you do not see the information for the 
previous installs. They are there, but not in the grub.conf file.

You can mount your boot partition for Fedora 1 and then with and editor 
cut and paste the information from your grub/grub.conf file into your 
newly installed Fedora core2 test 1 addition. Then you could boot either 
system.

You can also use the rescue disk and then select the fedora 1 
installation. If the boot sector is /dev/hda1 or /dev/hdb1 you can 
chainload the other installations from the installation on the /hda11 
and above installations.

Here is an explaination of what I did.

To get grub to boot from a chainloader with the /dev/hda1 installation, 
I had to boot into the installation that had the boot mount as /dev/hda1 
and run grub-install /dev/hda1 for that installation. I booted into the 
installation that had /dev/hdb1 as the boot partition and ran 
grub-install /dev/hdb1.

On the installation that was installed on the higher order partitions I 
let this be installed on /dev/hda because of BIOS problems and could not 
mount the distribution any other way.

an excerpt of what I added to the higher order devices is posted below. 
The benifit with this method is that each installation has it's own boot 
partition and when updated it updates its independent grub.conf file.

I hope I shed a bit of direction and was not confusing you much.

Good luck,

Jim

-------------

title Fedora Core (2.6.2-1.74)
	root (hd1,4)
	kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.2-1.74 ro root=LABEL=/1
	initrd /initrd-2.6.2-1.74.img
title Bootloader HDA1
	rootnoverify (hd0,0)
	chainloader +1
title Bootloader HDB1
	rootnoverify (hd1,0)
	chainloader +1





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