Just had a rather odd experience with the FC3 install messing up the grub that i told it not to touch!
sda1 has Scientific Linux (a RHEL3 derivative) sda2 had FC3-test3, using grub from sda1 (I installed FC3-test3 without grub, and later manually
configured grub to also boot from sda2)
Is your device.map accurate . In the /boot/grub directory there is a device.map file which describes what grub things about your hard drives . Should that file for any reason become inaccurate then it is pretty possible that your machine will become unbootable.
I decided to do a full fresh install, like i had installed fc3-test3. Identical procedure.
I tried to boot the old SL/RHEL3 from sda1.... get a kernel panic, with the "no init found" message.
Well the " no init found " doesn't really tell much . Since there can be 2 reasons .
1. There is no init file to be found . I don't really thing so that is the reason in your case . 2. The init file is there but grub can't access it .
So, somehow the FC3 install messed
up the MBR/grub info....
I don't thing that the problem is with the MBR , it is rather that grub
stage 1 is unable to access grub stage 2 ( the grub.conf file and the rest )
I then tried rescue boot and changing all LABEL=/ (and similar) to the hardcoded /dev/sdaX references and even re-ran grub-install, but to no avail.
Anybody have a clue what could be going on here. From running chroot in the rescue cd it looks like all the proper files are in my /boot, so I'm quite stumped here.
Nobody deletes those files ( the files within the /boot directory ) , those
files get updated though in order to serve the various OSes you want to
boot . So the last installation that you performed , the fresh Fedora Core 3
one changed the /boot/grub/grub.conf file in order to facilitate it's needes and
that probably caused the condition you are facing.
One last thing that comes accross is the initrd file .
In your posting you are refering to sda . If i am correct this means the first SCSI disk
of your system . Do you have proper initrd files that load the necessary modules that are
needed in order to access your SCSI disk ?
Kind Regards, Kostas
