broken grub question

James Pifer jep at obrien-pifer.com
Thu Sep 2 01:27:15 UTC 2004


On Wed, 2004-09-01 at 19:25, Scott Talbot wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-09-01 at 10:50, James Pifer wrote:
> > I posted this to the redhat list, but there isn't much activity. I have
> > a problem with grub on a redhat 9 machine that I'm hoping someone here
> > might be able to help with. I have a Fedora system that appears to have
> > the same problem. 
> > 
> > I installed a new kernel on the redhat 9 machine but do not see it in
> > the menu on boot. I found that /boot/grub was empty. 
> 
> Is /boot empty as well? are the initrd, map and kernel files listed when
> you ls /boot?
> 

No, there were files in boot. 

> > I tried
> > reinstalling grub as well as manually putting the missing files back in
> > based on another redhat 9 system I have. 
> > 
> > /etc/grub.conf points to /boot/grub/grub.conf. I modified grub.conf and
> > it looks like below, but I still only see the original kernel listed. 
> 
> 	Okay, if I read you correctly your /boot/grub/ was empty and you copied
> files from another box, But your system booted with an empty /boot/grub?
> 
> 	I recall seeing something like that before and I think that the problem
> was deemed to be two /boot partitions on the same machine causing linux
> to become confused.  Is it possible you have 2 linux distros on your
> machine? or maybe somewhere else you made an extra partition?

I had recently added a second hard drive that had Linux already
installed on it and it still had the boot partition and it was marked as
bootable. Using fdisk I removed the /boot partition from the second
drive, which of course also removed the extra boot flag. But when I
reboot I get the same behavior. Only the original kernel in the menu to
boot from. I also reran fdisk and verified the partition had been
removed from that disk. 

> 
> 	To test the possibility of this, change the grub.conf file to something
> that you can see upon boot, i.e. add 'test' to the title line or
> something.

I have modified grub.conf and made sure menu.lst points to grub. It
still only shows me one option. I can't figure out where the heck it's
getting it from. Here are the only grub.conf files on the system:
# locate grub.conf
/boot/grub/grub.conf
/etc/grub.conf
# ls -l /etc/grub.conf
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           22 Aug 30 20:20 /etc/grub.conf
-> ../boot/grub/grub.conf
# ls -l /boot/grub/grub.conf
-rw-------    1 root     root          550 Aug 30 20:20
/boot/grub/grub.conf
[root at mythtv root]# 

Thanks for the help,
James





More information about the fedora-list mailing list