Hi Michael, Thanks for your extensive answer and explanations: something to study for me, but in the meanwhile I think I understand most of it. Also executed all repair steps as you recommended, starting with booting using the interactive GRUB commands that you showed. Perfect!! So I repaired both FSTAB and GRUB.CONF as you told me and re-installed GRUB. But... the system still won't boot and end up with the GRUB-prompt. Can it be the following: 1. for the dual-boot installation with XP I had to copy the boot-partition to a file and use it in my XP-boot process, according to http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux/grub-w2k-HOWTO.htm. 2. Do I have to re-do this now to get my machine back to normal, succesfull linux boot? Or is something else still rotten? (currently no other info, I'm at my work now and just take some minutes to send a web-mail) Thanks again, Hans Troost > 1.) You would need to edit /boot/grub/grub.conf and replace (hd0,7) > with (hd0,5) everywhere, so GRUB finds your /boot partition again. > (hd0,5) is /dev/hda6, your /boot partition > > 2.) You would need to edit /etc/fstab and make the swap partition be > /dev/hda8 instead of /dev/hda10. Take out or correct the entries for > your /mnt/windows partitions, as they are wrong, too. > > 3.) You would need to reinstall GRUB into your /boot partition. You > can do that within the rescue chroot: grub-install /dev/hda6 > > In case you edit the copies of these files with Windows XP, be sure to > use a text editor which can edit and save Unix-style files. Else you > would need to process them with dos2unix when you're back in Linux. > > [...] > > Alternatively, what I would try: boot your XP bootloader, choose > Linux, and at the GRUB command prompt (you mentioned your system > doesn't boot further), enter: > > root (hd0,5) > kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.8-1.521 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet > initrd /initrd-2.6.8-1.521.img > boot > > That should start your system normally, albeit fail to activate the > swap space. The first thing you would need to do is to fix things 1, > 2, 3 as described above. >
