Re: FC5 fails to boot after install

Mike McCarty wrote:

dpeck wrote:

"What does your grub.conf file look like? Have you
tried to boot by hand?"

what is the command for manually booting linux? again i'm new, so i probably wont completely understand half of what you say.

Well it takes a few, not just one.

I'm sure someone here will say I'm completely off base, and
that you just need to do something simple which will work
(well, 95% of the time, anyway). But I like to be methodical and
understand what is wrong and figure out how to fix it.

You might get your machine up faster listening to one of
those people. You might have a better understanding of
how your machine boots and what to do when it won't if
you are more methodical.

My theory as well.

I see that you need a more-or-less complete tutorial
on how to run GRUB. I can't give you one here, so read
the manual, as they say. However, I'll step you through some
basics.

First, GRUB is not an operating system, and it knows very little
about file systems. It deals with discs, and uses a non-OS specific
method to deal with them.

So, naming conventions...

Hard disc names are (hd<driveno>), like this

    (hd0)

This is the name of the first hard drive. The second
hard drive is called

    (hd1)

Partitions on the drives are named like this

    (hd<driveno>,<partitionno>)

For example, the third partition on the second drive is
named
    (hd1,2)

GRUB boots in two (or more) stages. The first stage is
loaded into memory by the BIOS (at location 07C0:0000) and the
second stage gets loaded after that by the first
stage. The second stage is peculiar to the file system used,
and knows how to read it. The directory separator is
"/". So, on my machine, my /boot is on /dev/hda3, so
/boot/grub/grub.conf appears to GRUB as

    (hd0,2)/grub/grub.conf

GRUB needs to be configured to know where to look for that
file, because of course, it can't read file systems until
the code to read file systems is read in. This is done with
the GRUB program (not to be confused with the GRUB boot code),
and which is used to install a configured GRUB, either to the MBR,
or to a BR within a partition.

My spash screen is thus on

    (hd0,2)/grub/splash.xpm.gz

Now, having all those (hd0,2) in names is redundant,
so GRUB has a means to specify a sort of default directory
like in Linux when you cd to a directory, then names become
relative to that path, only in this case it is a partition/
file system relative. This is done with the root command:

        root (hd0,2)

It's not necessary, but it saves some typing.

Ok, now to boot Linux, one needs two things (this is one
of the areas where Linux departs from the multiboot standard,
I believe).

One of them is the location of the kernel (ok so far)
and the other is the location of the inital RAM disc
(not part of the multiboot standard). These are
specified by the kernel and inird commands.

So, I can boot my Linux machine by using these commands...

    root (hd0,2)

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.10-1.771_FC2 ro root=LABEL=/ acpi=off rhgb quiet

    initrd /initrd-2.6.10-1.771_FC2.img
    boot

The first simply specifies a disc "path" to which everything is
relative, the second specifies where the kernel is, and what boot
parameters to pass to it (my machine has a broken ACPI BIOS interface,
so I have to turn that off, "rhgb" specifies to use a graphical boot
rather than the text boot etc.). The third specifies the initial
RAM disc to use. The fourth tells GRUB that I'm through specifying
stuff, and to proceed with the boot, and load the kernel.

it's kinda hard to view files from a linux install from windows.

:-)

But you *can* boot the Fedora rescuecd, and you can also use the
install disc, but with rescue on the boot command line.

what do you mean by disc setup...boot priority? originally it was:
1. [CDROM]
2. [CDROM]
3. [Floppy] after this is an assumption
4. [HDD-0]
5. [HDD-1]

should i change it to 1. [CDROM]
2. [HDD-1]
3. [HDD-0]

then retry the install?

[snip]

-Dan