[NCLUG] grub reinstall and /boot recovery

[Simon Branton-Housley]

Ok provided that you have created a new /dev/hda or formatted your old
/dev/hda, AND can boot from this computer (via cdrom), then you can
follow this guide to installing GRUB or LILO on your system. Granted,
you are using redhat, but the underlying system is still the same.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook.xml?part=1&chap=9


<-----Original Message-----> 
From: Daniel Herrington
Sent: 11/27/2003 11:58:33 AM
To: nclug at nclug.org
Subject: Re: [NCLUG] grub reinstall and /boot recovery

Help!

I'm at my wit's end. Here's the situation:

I've got a laptop that I had RH9 on. I wanted to send it in for service 
(the LCD flickers), so I took the hard drive out and backed it up using 
dd on my desktop machine. I used dd to put the entire /dev/hdb (laptop 
drive) onto /dev/hde (a slightly larger drive on my PC). The "total 
records in" matched the "total records out". I checked the partition 
sizes and everything seemed okay. I loaded the original OS (Win95) onto 
the laptop drive, sent the laptop in for service, and got it back. When 
I attempted "dd if=/dev/hde of=/dev/hdb" on my desktop PC, I got an 
error that dd couldn't finish (the "total records out" was 1 less than 
the "total records in"). When I put the laptop drive back into the 
laptop, it wouldn't boot (not a surprise). I hooked it back up to my 
desktop and verified that the second partition (used for / ) is fine, 
but the first partition (used for /boot ) is corrupted. It's corrupted 
on the backup hard drive as well, so I can't get it back.

However, I have a very similar OS (RH9 with a few extra kernels compiled
in addition to what the laptop had) on my desktop PC, so I thought I 
could just mkfs.ext3 the laptop drive's first partition, cp -a * from 
the /boot partition of my desktop drive's /boot partition to the laptop 
drive's /boot partition, and then use the boot floppy for the laptop to 
successfully boot... at which point I could run "grub-install /dev/hda" 
or "grub-install --root-directory=/boot /dev/hda" on the laptop drive. 
This runs just fine, but when I try to boot without the boot floppy, I 
get "Insert disk,..." and a few strange characters.

Assuming I blew away my /boot partition, is there any way for me to 
salvage my OS installation? What are the steps I should take to get it 
back? Am I running the grub reinstall correctly? (I must admit, I've 
never felt as comfortable with grub and how it works as I did with
lilo.)

Thanks,
Daniel Herrington


_______________________________________________
NCLUG mailing list NCLUG at nclug.org

To unsubscribe, subscribe, or modify 
your settings, go to: 
http://www.nclug.org/mailman/listinfo/nclug 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.nclug.org/pipermail/nclug/attachments/20031127/201d1cd6/attachment.html>