New grub problem on FC7 - suggestions anyone?

[William W. Austin]

Yesterday I installed a new kernel - kernel-2.6.22.5-76.fc7 (installed 
via rpm -ivh - I never remove old kernels until I am *sure* that the 
new one is OK).

That is the ONLY new package I have installed since the last reboot 
(about a week ago).  This morning I had to reboot (I wanted to install 
a new video card), and I did so ... but then remembered something I had 
to do first, so I just let the reboot cycle continue.

New problem: grub no longer boots the system.  I tried again after full 
power-down.  Same result.  Eventually after the usual HW/bios startup 
messages I get a black screen, and the word GRUB appears.  Then several 
seconds another GRUB is added.  I let this run while I ran an errand - 
and it continued that way "GRUB   GRUB    ... etc" for over an hour.  
There were _no_ error messages.  I was able to reboot using the rescue 
CD, and did full fsck's of all drives.  Luckily I have another working 
system here with a burner and I created a boot CD so that I can get the 
machine to boot.

After I got the machine to boot using a boot cd, I did a grub-install, 
but the results are different - I get Error 17 (which is cannot mount 
selected partition).

This tells me that the wrong drive is being found by grub - this is a 
server with 5 large drives on it).  But beyond that I am stumped.

I've been RTFM'ing, but so far I haven't found any way to get grub to 
find the right drive in the boot process - or to tell me WHICH drive it
actually is finding. (And I checked my grub.conf against a backup copy. 
Except for adding the new kernel, they are identical.)  Removing the 
new kernel did not help (nor did re-installing it).

Any suggestions would be welcome - not having grub working is 
inconvenient at best.

-- 
william w. austin                               waustin at speakeasy.net
"life is just another phase i'm going through. this time, anyway ..."