Fred, What you need to do is boot from the rescue CD, mount the boot partition, edit the menu.lst to replace hda3 with hda4 . Save and reboot. Cheers, florin Original, long, explanation, follows ... On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 12:32:30PM -0700, Fred H Olson wrote: > Florin, thanks so much for the advice. I'm sure you'd have this fixed in a > flash if you were at my keyboard but I suppose it's a learning experience > for me to muddle thru it. Don't ask me how I got my learning experience... 8^) > I did "find" my root (hda1), home (hda4) and boot (hda5) partitions from > the live cd version of Ubuntu 7.04. fsck found no errors on nay of > these partitions. > > The message below got rather long so I'll ask what I think is the ekey > next question here up front: > > My /boot is a separate partition so how do I modify > your example "kernel" and "initrd" command strings as a result? The indices are 0-based, both for disks and partitions, so root (hd0, 4) is correct. Then, as you see in your own GRUB file, you remove the "boot/" from the paths, since your files are in the root directory on the boot partition. > Here goes the long response... > > In your most recent message you wrote: > > > It would be useful to boot with a recent rescue disk, then look in the > > /boot directory/partition to see what kernels and ramdisks are present > > (and print the list of files). Then, copy (and preferably print) > > the /boot/grub/menu.lst file. > > See copies appended below. > > > Reboot the computer and type 'c' at the GRUB prompt. > > This will drop you in a command shell. > (It's <esc> c now) > > > From there, you need to tell grub where to > > find the kernel (and all the information is in menu.lst). > > > For instance, to manually boot my server, I would type the following: > > > root (hd0,0) > > kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-1-686 root=/dev/sda1 ro console=tty0 > > initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-1-686 > > boot > > > > This assumes that my root disk is the first partition of the first > > disk and /boot is a directory on the root partition. > > > > If any of the 'kernel' or 'initrd' commands fails, this means > > grub cannot find a requisite file. Then try again, using an older > > kernel/initrd (if you upgraded, you should have some older versions > > lying around). > > I got to the command shell from grub and > root (hd0,4) > got the response: > Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83 Good. > My /boot is a separate partition so I am unsure how to modify > your example "kernel" and "initrd" command strings. > > > I wanted to "look around" at various partitions to see if they looked as > expected but the Grub shell does not have an "ls" command ! (I tried > find /boot/* > and > find /* > but just got an error message tho it tries to access the floppy drive! > > I note that in menu.1st all the entries in the AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST > have root (hd0,0) which would seem like it would explain the problem > reboot. In the next line what does root=/dev/hda3 refer to? 'root=/dev/foo' tells the kernel what to mount as root file system. It seems that you and grub have a disagreement on which file system to use 8^) > According to: > http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#kernel > "The rest of the line is passed verbatim as the kernel command-line" > but I have not found an explanation of of the "kernel command-line" That is specific to every operating system. For the explanation of the linux command line look in the linux kernel sources, in the Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt file. > Also it occurs to me that a bit more background might give a clue to how > this situation developed. > > When I installed Ubuntu 6.06 on this computer at an installfest. > we only allowed about 2.5 GB for the root partition. For a year I got > along with this but it was tight. At the installfest in August (2007) > I got help getting a larger root partition. We had to moove all files > to an external harddisk, make a new larger partition (with a different > partition number) and move the files back. After a bit of tweaking > it ran fine till I did the upgrades. I suspect there was something that > did not get updated to account for the new partition layout... Aha! Whomever helped you do this, manually patched the _USED_ entries in grub, but not the _COMMENTED OUT_ entry for kopt, which the grub updater uses. On the next update, you got a new kernel, and the kernel package installer script ran the grub updater, which regenerated the file. Editing the menu.lst should get you going. -- Bruce Schneier expects the Spanish Inquisition. http://geekz.co.uk/schneierfacts/fact/163 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: Digital signature Url : http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20070918/1d79dd61/attachment.pgp