booting stops at grub shell

[Scott Talbot]

V Krish wrote:

>I had Fedora Core 2 on my machine. When one of the
>internal disk drives failed, I put in a new 300GB
>drive as the master drive. I also re-installed Fedora
>Core 2 from scratch on this drive. The boot process
>now stops at the grub prompt. If I try 'boot', the
>message is "kernel not loaded" or something similar.
>What may cause this?
>
>Thank you
>Krish
>  
>
    The good news is that grub is installed fine, however for some 
reason it cannot find /grub/grub.conf.  One possibility is that your 
/boot is a Reiserfs partition (for some reason Grub doesn't like that 
too well).

    If you have /boot in a ext2 or ext3 (ext2 is better imo, I don't 
recall if it is discouraged).  Anyway try this.

GRUB>find /grub/grub.conf

    This will likely return the name of the partition that has grub.conf 
on it. If it should fail to find grub,  You'll need to boot into CD 1. 
At the prompt enter linux rescue.  Follow directions till you get to the 
part where it tells you to enter chroot /mnt/sysimage, then to 
grub-install /dev/hda (assuming that your Bios is set to boot the 
primary master hard drive). after that type exit <enter> and reboot your 
computer to see if it works.

Another possibility that I've seen is that you might have 2 /boot 
directories (this confuses linux!) or if you left the /boot entry from 
your FC3 and are now using the same partition as root (actually I never 
saw this, and I'm not sure this could cause a problem. I currently have  
/boot for FC4 and a boot within a Rawhide distro with no problems.  You 
could try findfs LABEL=/boot to see if you have a partition.

if the find command returned for example (hd0,0) you could type:
GRUB>configfile(hd0,0)/grub/grub.conf
which should load the config file and allow you to boot Fedora

HTH

Scott