Hosed Grub with the push of a button

[Jim Cornette]

max wrote:
> max wrote:
>> max wrote:
>>> Jim Webb wrote:
>>>> max wrote:
>>>>> I hosed grub. I need to fix it. I booted from fedora rescue. I 
>>>>> chroot to /mnt/sysimage. All good. I tried :
>>>>>
>>>>> grub-install  /dev/sda
>>>>>
>>>>> The  file /boot/grub/stage1 not read correctly
>>>>>
>>>>> tried:
>>>>>
>>>>> grub-install /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
>>>>>
>>>>> The file /boot/grub/stage1 not read correctly
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> tried:
>>>>>
>>>>> cd /boot/grub
>>>>>
>>>>> cat stage1
>>>>>
>>>>> output maybe human readable by some humans but not this one.
>>>>>
>>>>> So far I can still see all the user files so I can backup and 
>>>>> reinstall but that wouldn't teach me anything.
>>>>> All suggestions/insults/how-to's welcome.
>>>>>
>>>>> Max
>>>>>
>>>> Max,
>>>> I looked this up on Red Hat's KBase:
>>>>
>>>> http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-5-manual/en-US/RHEL510/Installation_Guide/s2-rescuemode-boot-reinstall-bootloader.html 
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Hope this helps,
>>>> Jim
>>>>
>>>
>>> Thanks for the link but i had tried that and it didn't work. The 
>>> following explains why but I don't see an easy way to do it, i'll do 
>>> it the hard way , its the only option left, I need some help on best 
>>> method or whether its even possible.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  From rescue cd, l let me outline what i see like a terminal :
>>>
> I finally wised up and ran fdsik -l ( it aint pretty):
> 
> sh-3.2#fdisk -l
> 
> Device        Boot            Start        End        Blocks        
> Id    System
> /dev/sda1     *            30076         30401       2618563         
> c    W95 FAT32(LBA)
> /dev/sda2                    26        30401          243995220        
> 8e   Linux LVM
> 
> Partition table entries are not in disk order.
> 
> I really could use a few pointers here as I am not sure that its even 
> possible to recover at this point. I wish I'd have thought to run this 
> command sooner, course i'd not have learned some of the handy info I've 
> picked up since I touched off this mess so I guess I've broken even, not 
> bad but I'd still like to think I could come out ahead on this one or 
> should I just backup and install/upgrade to Sulphur.
> 
> 
> 
> Max
> 
> 
> 

It looks to me that the FAT partition is in portions that the LVM 
occupies. You don't have 0 through 25 occupied. I don't know if this was 
where your /boot partition was or not.

DANGER, This may not work:
What I would do is to run fdisk /dev/sda and delete the FAT partition 
and then try to create a new partition for 0 to 25 for boot as EXT3. 
Then I would format the partition ext3 and make an entry in fstab that 
would mount this partition as /boot using the label.
Then I would take the install disk and select upgrade the system. 
Anaconda should install a new kernel and setup grub. Hopefully it will 
not downgrade any programs like it did several releases back, FC5 I believe.
Of course backing up info you want to save to flash, tape or disk would 
probably be best before attempting maybe disastrous trials.

For the next release of Fedora, it uses new programs where the boot 
partition needs to be a bit larger to use some new form for updating 
that uses a GUI. It probably is best to install clean for the next 
release because of several new options like encrypted filesystems, 
different init methods, possible choice of ext4 filesystem and a new 
type of updating program. There are other items but these are what I 
recall myself.

Jim

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