On Sat, 2006-02-04 at 15:51 -0500, Glenn Tober wrote: > I have an ASUS P5GDC mother board with SATA drives and the usual other > stuff. A while back I successfully installed WXP and FC3 and ran both > using a GRUB boot prompt without any problems whatsoever. Recently I > got the FC4 disk set and installed it without problems. Well, > afterwards, there are few drivers and such you need and in the process > of getting these, and I think doing something to grub.conf which I > should not have, the whole system boot went south. I could not > recover it with the rescue disk. > > > > OK, so next I restored WXP using the fixmbr utility, and WXP is fine. > I have now reinstalled both FC3 and FC4 several times and grub does > not install properly in all cases. There is some screen activity in > place of the “grub stage1 loading’ but there is no dual boot choice of > any kind and no evidence whatsoever that the stage1 boot routine is > actually on the MBR and trying to load. > > > > I have a root partition which I choose not to reformat, and a /usr > partition which I always reformat during each FC install. I am doing > a plain vanilla installation of a default workstation. I choose the > grub boot loader option the same way each time. If it is not clear, > what worked fine one time before for both FC3 and FC4 is now broke and > I am stumped. Grub documentation seems hard to find and what to do > next? I have heard others mention a GRUB restore option on the FC > install menus and I cannot find such a thing. I am reluctant to > reformat the root partition because of my home directory, but why > should that matter anyway? HELP! > The recommendation from many on this list is to have a /home partition that you do not have to format. / and /usr _should_ be formatted if you are trying to do a clean install. / (especially /etc) contains the configuration files and if this gets corrupted by repeated installs the results are unpredictable. It is likely that something already in / is telling the installer that grub is already installed so it is not treating the installation as new. You did not indicate whether /boot is its own partition, but data already there that does not get properly cleaned out can cause problems with grub. When doing an install with another os (XP) already on the drive, a clean install will ask if you want to dual boot and set up grub for that to happen. I would recommend that you create a partition for /home and move your data there, then you can do a clean install of the entire OS with formatting / as well as /usr (and any other parts that are not /home) and not just parts of it.
