Fwd: urgent pc wont load

[Jonathan Berry]

On Sun, 9 Jan 2005 13:14:22 -0500, jim lawrence <fedorajim at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 09 Jan 2005 19:05:57 +0100, Alexander Dalloz <ad+lists at uni-x.org> wrote:
> > Am So, den 09.01.2005 schrieb jim lawrence um 18:57:
> >
> > > -- it says  starting grub stage2...         then the cursor sits under
> > > neath that line
> >
> > So it does not find stage 2.
> >
> > > jim lawrence
> >
> > What is the content of your grub.conf?
> > What does "fdisk -l" print out?
> >
> > Alexander
> device      boot    start   end    blocks   id system
> *************************************************************
> dev.hda1     *        1        1275                7   ntfs
> dev/hda2               1276  1288              83  linux
> dev.hda3               1289   2498              f     W95 Ext'd  (LBA)
> dev/hda5               1289   1416             82   Linux Swap
> dev/hda6               1417    2498            83   linux
> 
> my question is where is the boot partition i created, and where id hda4  ?
> 
> if i need to reinstall
> i have a win98 boot floppy   could i do
> 
> fdisk /mbr

It looks like perhaps the boot partition is hda2.  Can you mount it
somewhere when booting from the rescue disk and see what is in it?  Or
type "mount" to see if it was automatically mounted.  If it contains
kernel images and a grub/ directory, then it is the boot partition. 
You need to then change your grub.conf entry to read:
> title fedora core  2.6.9-1.667
>        root  (hd0,2)
>        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-1.667 ro root=label=/1 rhgb quiet
>        initrd  /initrd-2.6.9-1.667.img
It would not hurt to remove the "rhgb" and "quite" parameters either. 
If none of this works, try reinstalling grub after booting to rescue
disk and the chroot.  The command is:
grub-install /dev/hda
If grub won't detect your boot partition, I think there are probably
parameters that you can pass it to force it to do the right thing.

The fdisk /mbr from the Win98 boot disk will get you to where you can
boot Windows again, but will not fix grub.  No need to do this to
reinstall Fedora (or Windows), just boot from the CD.

To answer your question about hda4, hda1 - 4 are primary partitions,
so extended logical partitions have to start with hda5.  So, hda3 is
the primary partition corresponding to your extended partition and
hda5 is the first logical partition in that.  Actually, you can skip
numbers if you really wanted to.  There is no need to have an hda2,
for instance, but it makes sense to.  Mostly this can happen if you
delete two partitions and make them one big partition.

Jonathan