[F9] laptop not booting - reinstall MBR?

[Tod Merley]

On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 9:45 AM, Don Levey <fedora-list at the-leveys.us> wrote:
> My F9 laptop won't boot this morning - I go through the POST, but when I
> ordinarily get to the "Hit Enter for options" boot screen, all I get is:
>
>        GRUB
>
> at the top left of my screen.  Does this mean I need to reinstall grub and
> the MBR?  I can access the HD via a liveCD, and everything *seems* OK from
> what I can tell.  Any thoughts?
>
> Thanks,
>  -Don
>
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Hi Don!

If it were me I would start by re-booting - loading the factory CMOS
defaults - carefully checking the boot order (make sure intended disk
on top!) and then a "save and exit" so going into the boot process
with "fresh" CMOS parameters of known characteristics.  Your system
seems to have a major change but I have been thrown off many times by
the old CMOS battery or dirty CMOS battery connector.  Frankly on some
of my old machines I make it a practice to load the CMOS fresh
(factory parameters) at boot.  If your laptop is newer you may need to
change the battery (sometimes called the "reserve" battery and
sometimes simply the backup battery but more accurately the CMOS
battery).

If I had problems past this I would boot with a live CD and snoop
around with parted or fdisk to see how the parameter table was doing
and check that the Grub files were in thier proper places (grub.conf
in /boot/grub  -- The proper kernel image ( e.g.
/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-19-generic  is my current Ubuntu kernel image and
/boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-19-generic is my current ramdisk image
referenced in my /boot/grub/menu.lst (/boot/grub/grub.conf in Fedora).

The mentioned stanzas from the menu.lst (grub.conf) file on my current machine:

title		Ubuntu 8.04.1, kernel 2.6.24-19-generic
root		(hd0,3)
kernel		/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-19-generic
root=UUID=860b7b47-19cd-48e9-9757-c00ace4a97f7 ro quiet splash
initrd		/boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-19-generic
quiet

title		Ubuntu 8.04.1, kernel 2.6.24-19-generic (recovery mode)
root		(hd0,3)
kernel		/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-19-generic
root=UUID=860b7b47-19cd-48e9-9757-c00ace4a97f7 ro single
initrd		/boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-19-generic

title		Ubuntu 8.04.1, memtest86+
root		(hd0,3)
kernel		/boot/memtest86+.bin
quiet

### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST

If all were there and looked OK I would then look up on the web how to
use dd to copy and then use hexedit (or simliar hex dumper editor) to
look at the actual MBR and probaby first sector.  Google "MBR
thestarman" for lots of details.

Let us know - sounds interesting!

Good Hunting!

Tod