Boot problem on F8 system

Langdon Stevenson langdon at lindenrow.com.au
Sun Mar 15 02:50:28 UTC 2009


I have a Fedora 8 server that I recently ran pre-upgrade on in 
preparation to moving to Fedora 10.  After pre-upgrade ran the server 
was rebooted and will not start.  The symptoms are as follows:

Server boots and detects all disks (it has 6 scsi disks running software 
raid).

Boot up continues and at the point where Grub should run I get the output:

grub grub grub grub grub grub grub grub grub grub grub grub grub grub 
grub grub grub grub grub grub grub grub grub grub grub grub grub grub 
grub grub

this goes on forever, filling screen after screen and gradually slows 
down and down.

Has anyone seen this happen before, or know what might cause it?  I 
can't find any reference via Google


I am working on the assumption that the master boot record is screwed up 
in some way, so want to try repairing it.  But no luck there as I can't 
mount the root file system.

I have booted using an F8 rescue CD and when the installer tries to 
detect existing partitions it fail.  No partitions are found.

When I drop through to a command prompt, all of the disk show up fine 
and I can use

   mdadm -Ac partitions -m X /dev/mdX

to assemble and run all of the raid partitions (boot, swap, root).

 From there I can mount /boot and its contents are available to read and 
write.  I cannot however work out how to remount / as / is in a logical 
volume on md2 and VolGroup00 does not show up in /dev

This leaves me without the grub-install command, so I can't re-install 
grub.  I have downloaded a live spin of F8 and will see if I can boot 
from that, but I am out of blank CDs at the moment.  So any suggestions 
about how I could mount the / partition would be appreciated.

Langdon




More information about the fedora-list mailing list