FC4 Grub install problems - Solved

[David Niemi]

On Fri, 2005-15-07 at 18:31 -0400, David Niemi wrote: 
> I just installed FC4 i386_x64 onto a system with 2 IDE drives (ntfs) and
> 2 SATA drives.  The system is set to boot from the first SATA drive in
> the BIOS which I installed fedora to.  The upgrade FC3 -> FC4 appeared
> to go well except for the installation of grub.  System ran great with
> FC3.
> 
> When trying to boot all I get is "GRUB" no prompt or anything.  Booting
> from the DVD in rescue mode, mounting the installed FC4 and running
> grub, things appear to not work right.  At the grub prompt I cannot get
> any of the TAB completions.
> 
> With the old installation grub referenced (hd0,0) now it seems that it
> is (hd2,0).  It seems that all of the proper files are located in the
> boot partition.
> 
> should I:
> - edit the /boot/grub.grub.conf to refer to (hd2,0)
> - issue grub commands:
>    GRUB> root (hd2,0)
>    GRUB> setup (hd2)
> 

Turns out since I did an upgrade with the 64 bit dvd the grub didn't
get updated for some funny reason.

Booting from the rescue CD then into the grub prompt and running the
command:
        grub> cat (hd0)/grub/grub.conf
        
for all 4 drives it appears that grub was seeing my install on (hd2)
whereas I had the BIOS set to boot from this drive which meant that it
should have been (hd0).  The FC3 install had everything referring to
(hd0).

I copied the files from /usr/share/grub/x86_64-redhat to /boot/grub
I then ran "grub-install /dev/sda"

This listed my drives as:
        hd0	/dev/hda
        hd1	/dev/hdb
        hd2	/dev/sda
        hd3	/dev/sdb

Then entered the grub prompt and ran:
        grub> root (hd2,0)
        grub> setup (hd2)

I had changed the grub.conf to refer hd2 but was getting the "Error 17:
cannot mount selected partition" and the type was given as "7" == NTFS,
so it was seeing one of my other 3 drives for some reason.

So, I changed my grub.conf back to refer to (hd0) and voila, it worked.

It appears that others have had similar problems when dealing with
previous installs and I don't know if there is a bug report on this or
not.

Dave