grub> (all I get when I boot my laptop)

[erlking]

grub>

This is what I get when I boot my dual boot (win 7, Fedora 16). Could you guys help me out to get my system booting again, please?

I rebooted to a installation fedora 15 cd, and I get bash, but I have to say thats how far I get. I would like to get my hands dirty on this, cause this happens quite frequent when trying and installing distros, always something screws grub.

Thanks in advance community.

---------- Post added at 09:08 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:55 PM ----------

right so Im trying this so far, but Im kind of blind here:

grub> set
color_highlight=black/white
color_normal=bla
pager=
prefix=(hd0,msdos6)/grub2
root=hd0,msdos6

when I enter ls:
(hd0) (hd0,msdos7) (hd0,msdos6) (hd0,msdos5) (hd0,msdos3) (hd0,msdos2) (hd0,msdos1

)

[sea]

Its not bash, its the grub recovery console.

So far, i had prefered to do another install, rather than to "play" on this console...
But as much i understand it, its like you handle each and every command that is required to boot to the console.

This includes, but not limited to:
* Physical location of /boot
* Location/Name of initramfs
* Location/Name of Kernel

Here's a resource to read
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html
Note: Its updated to GRUB2

Hope this helps

EDIT:
This console shows up (according to my experience) in either one of the following cases:
* Boot order of devices has been changed in BIOS
* The partition which contained the boot partition (kernels) was deleted or moved
* The installation of the boot loader had failed.

[DanieW]

Dual boot win 7 with F16, you have two choices.
a) Boot from windows boot partition (not recovery partition; both only visible from windows under Manage, Hardware, Partitions something... ie no drive letters) into BCDEdit and from there into grub. (What I am using) There is a nice guide on the net available. Advantage is that when you suspend windows and start up again, windows resume where it left off.
b) Over ride (/write) the boot sector of the boot partition with grub (boot sector) (what I suspect has happend with you). with wrong settings now for grub.

Either way you now might have to learn the grub interface commands for the about 5 steps to manually boot to /boot and then fix /boot/grub/grub.conf

Now use the live CD to get as much info as you can about *all* the partitions so that you know the IDs and the order of them and then determine to where grub should point for /boot
Look at fdisk /dev/sda from the CLI from the live CD. Ok?

[erlking]

Thanks for all your replies.

I should have started in this way:
The last time I used the laptop was on the 26 of april at the morning. The last thing I did was to shutdown: shutdown -h now, which I usually do. So no changes other that shuting down the machine in this way.
It has been working fine for long time.

so Ive been reading around:
I use Grub2 super rescue and didnt recognize grub.conf file, but it did restore the windows 7 system.

So, I listed all the partitions:

hd0,7= unknown filesystem
hd0,6: ext2 - last modification 2012-04-26
hd0,5 Labeled "EXTRA" NTFS
hd0,3 Labeled OS NTFS
hd0,2 - labeled recovery ntfs
hd0,1 CD-ROM FAT.

So, Im clear on all this, then I try to set the root to different partitions by using:

set prefix=(hd0,7)/grub2 (Also, I have tried hd0,6)
set root=(hd0,7)
insmod normal
normal

Nada!, I willl keep looking around. Thanks community for all your help and advise.

---------- Post added at 04:22 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:12 PM ----------

so I used this script: http://bootinfoscript.sourceforge.net/

and gave me this interesting info:

Unknown BootLoader on vg_redcap-lv_swap'

Unknown BootLoader on vg_redcap-lv_home'

Unknown BootLoader on vg_redcap-lv_root'

redcap is the hostname, so Im guessing the for some unknow reason grub is not installed anymore?

[erlking]

Hello again,

alright, so I manage to know which one is the /boot partition. /dev/sda6 which in grub is hd0,6.

Now, because I used rescuetux disc, the disk recovered the windows 7 OS, so Im able to boot to win 7 from rescuedisk, but it doesnt find Fedora 16. So, at the moment here is how it looks:
Partition Boot Start Sector End Sector # of Sectors Id System

/dev/sda1 2,048 206,847 204,800 de Dell Utility
/dev/sda2 206,848 20,686,847 20,480,000 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS
/dev/sda3 * 20,686,848 143,566,847 122,880,000 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS
/dev/sda4 143,568,894 505,661,119 362,092,226 f W95 Extended (LBA)
/dev/sda5 338,419,712 505,661,119 167,241,408 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS
/dev/sda6 143,572,992 144,596,991 1,024,000 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 144,599,040 338,407,423 193,808,384 8e Linux LVM

this is by using bootinfo website script, by booting from centos live cd that I had spare.

So, now my question is how do I point grub to /dev/sda6.

this is what Im doing so far:
set prefix=(hd0,6)/grub2
set root=(hd0,6)
insmod normal (this is by following gnu web site)
normal
then what ??? after I loaded that module and run it, then I just go back to grub>

I tried to re-install grub from live cd after mounting the image by using: chroot /mnt/sysimage ,but grub-install was not found.

---------- Post added at 01:32 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:41 AM ----------

further:

set prefix=(hd0,6)/grub2
set root=(hd0,6)

linux (hd0,6)/vmlinuz-3.2.9-2.fc16.i686
initrd (hd0,6)/initramfs same as above.img

boot

then attempts to load the image,but it gets a kernel panic saying: Kernel panic - not syncing: attempted to kill init!

Thanks in advance!

---------- Post added at 04:13 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:32 PM ----------

I gave up guys, thanks anyway. I will backup my /home and re-install, also get rid of dual boot, and vbox windows 7. Thanks, I think I ve learned much more of what I knew about grub2;however, I couldnt solve this one. I tried by reinstalling grub2 from rescue cd, grub2-install needed to be run from /sbin/grub2-install. However, even after that nothing.

---------- Post added at 08:38 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:13 PM ----------

Righto, after a few more tries, I was able to re-install grub2 to the boot partion, what a world of pain, but plenty of knowledge. Many thanks.

[DanieW]

I would have liked to get all that experience ;^) , but was unavailable.
Booting now alright into grub and from there to win?
Any idea what went wong?
Does windows suspend work?

[bgoodwin91006]

For what it's worth, I dual boot Fedora16 and Win7. My bad experiences with grub were because of the following.

If I leave a usb device such as a video recorder plugged in during boot, the BIOS may change the basic designation of disk drives so that what was /dev/sdb becomes /dev/sdc.

Another problem I encountered was my system was set up to boot from the first disk, second partition that is, /dev/sda2. In Grub, that is device HD0,1. The kernel bootup parameters start a logical volume, /dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv. The kernel then uses the boot partition in the logical volume, forsaking the small boot partition in /dev/sda2. The problem with that is that when a kernel is updated, it is the /boot files on the logical volume that are updated, not the /boot files on sda2.

I have to manually transfer the /boot files from VolGroup-lv_root to the /boot directory on /dev/sda2. That involves mounting sda2 at a temporary mount point. Then cd to the root directory; /. Then issue this command;

tar -c boot|(cd /mnt/tmp; tar -x)

This creates a tar file of the boot directory, transfers the shell to the temporary directory where sda2 is mounted and pipes the file to tar to extract that /boot file. The brackets are not optional. Make sure the directory you 'cd' to is just above the boot directory.

Hope something of this will be useful in your quest for dual boot.

Bob G.

[DanieW]

Great! You won the prize of doing it yourself!
I have also burnt my fingers with Volume Groups before. When the next OS / distribution / boot loader did not see it.
Make sure your actual /boot partition is now mounted as /boot (and why not also rm the /boot contents under the root?)
I was not sure any more about the /dev/sda1 being either (hd0,0) or (hd0,1) (which is not the latter).
Thanks for the info.

[erlking]

Well, I was able to get linux back, after I recreated the grub file and ran super grub 2 rescue disk, but then I couldnt see windows. Back to square one. So backup my /home, installed f15 now, and now need to get win 7 back to work. So, I will keep trying eventually, I will get to fix it. Probably a few more hours this next weekend.