[lug] boot loader setup

[Michael D. Hirsch]

On Wednesday 12 February 2003 12:19 pm, jhaahei2 at gac.edu wrote:
> this is really a continuation of one of my last questions:
>
> at this point, i've reinstalled redhat 8 on what is now my slave hard
> drive.  windows xp is on the master, and during installation i wrote
> grub to the windows drive's mbr.  now when i boot my computer, it goes
> to a message saying  something like 'loading grub stage2'.  that takes a
> while, and then it brings me to a grub prompt:
>
> grub>

It souds like grub is a little confused.  Grub is supposed to offer you 
your choice of OS.

When you installed RH, did it find you Windows partition and offer to put 
it in grub?  

At this point you need to tell grub how to boot your system.  The good news 
is that grub is pretty smart.  The bad news is that the documentation is 
very confusing.  You usually have to type 'e' or something to be able to 
edit, but that may be only if it found the menu in the first place.  I 
think you can just type.

First, you should tell it where you /boot partition is.  If /boot is on 
/dev/hdb3, you would probably say 
root (hd1,2)
which means "look for all files on the second HD (0 is the first) and the 
third partition."  Future file references are relative to the top of that 
partition.  So if you have a /boot partition you leave /boot off the 
names.  If you don't have a /boot partition and /boot is inside you / 
partition you will include /boot in the file name.  I'll assume you do 
have a boot partition, so adjust accordingly.

Here is where filename completion is your friend.  Hitting tab will give 
completions.  type
kernel vmlinuz<TAB><TAB>
and see what it does.  If there are completions, use them.  If not, then 
maybe you don't have a boot partition and you should try
kernel /boot/vmlinuz<TAB><TAB>
Give it all your boot parameters.  My kernel line looks like:
	kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.18-14 ro root=LABEL=/
Then you need to do the same with your initrd:
	initrd /initrd-2.4.18-14.img

After you enter all that, type boot and hit enter.  That should boot you 
into RH.  Now check your grub installation.  Make sure that 
/boot/grub/menu.lst is as you want it.  To reinstall grub type 
"grub-install /dev/hda" to put it on your first drive.

Hope that helps,

Michael