Unable to boot my system totally - please help!

[Andy Green]

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On Sunday 05 December 2004 12:21, Paul F. Johnson wrote:
> Hi,
>
> > Without actually knowing what the problem is, the first move would
> > be to boot off your first install CD and select the sort of
> > "recovery mode" boot.
>
> Will try that
>
> > The boot filesystem must be accessible to grub otherwise it cannot
> > show you the stuff from /boot/grub/grub.conf.  I would boot into the
> > recovery install kernel and look carefully at my
> > /boot/grub/grub.conf to see if it is giving the correct partition to
> > boot from.
>
> I'm starting to wonder if there has been something in the latest rawhide.

I am tracking rawhide on this machine, have been since before FC1.  It's 
possible I missed some poison pill since it does not update every day.  There 
was an ugly kernel a month or two back that trashed filesystems: I was lucky 
and an fsck under a later kernel repaired it for me.

> The system was installed with FC 2.91 (IIRC, FC3t2) and has been kept up to
> date with rawhide since then. It isn't formatted to be using
> VolGroup00/LogVol00, but to be using the more conventional /dev/hdax.
>
> It's either that or when I asked someone else to install the kernel, they
> used rpm -Uv and ignored the postun (etc) errors... Now that will have
> screwed things up!

I installed the kernel you posted about and I did not get any errors on 
install, plus I am running it right now just fine.  What I DID get was for 
some reason /boot was not mounted at that time, the kernel files were instead 
copied into the mountpoint itself (ie, the /boot in the root filesystem that 
should be an empty mountpoint "covered over" by the actual mounted /boot 
filesystem).  I had to mount the boot filesystem elsewhere and copy over the 
files from /boot into it, adjust /boot/grub/grub./conf and then reboot and it 
worked fine.  I think this was to do with recent initscripts troubles at the 
time I installed the new kernel.

> I doubt the MBR is shafted as the machine is booting to grub, though I have
> noticed that /dev/hda1 does have a very old version of the system files in
> it, which makes me wonder if something is getting a wee bit confused.

What system files?

- -Andy

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http://www.addintelligence.co.uk -- we design custom hardware and software for 
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