Fedora Core 3 Installation

[Kostas Sfakiotakis]

Peter Teuben wrote:
> 
> Just had a rather odd experience with the FC3 install messing up the
> grub that i told it not to touch!
> 
> sda1 has Scientific Linux (a RHEL3 derivative) 
> sda2 had FC3-test3, using grub from sda1 
> 	(I installed FC3-test3 without grub,  and later manually
> 	configured grub to also boot from sda2)

Is your device.map accurate . In the /boot/grub directory there
is a device.map file which describes what grub things about your
hard drives . Should that file for any reason become inaccurate then
it is pretty possible that your machine will become unbootable.


> 
> I decided to do a full fresh install, like i had installed fc3-test3.
> Identical procedure.
> 
> I tried to boot the old SL/RHEL3 from sda1.... get a kernel panic,
> with the "no init found" message.

Well the " no init found " doesn't really tell much . Since there can
be 2 reasons .

1. There is no init file to be found . I don't really thing so that is the
reason in your case .
2. The init file is there but grub can't access it .


  So, somehow the FC3 install messed
> up the MBR/grub info....

I don't thing that the problem is with the MBR , it is rather that grub
stage 1 is unable to access grub stage 2 ( the grub.conf file and the 
rest )
> 
> I then tried rescue boot and changing all LABEL=/ (and similar)
> to the hardcoded /dev/sdaX references and even re-ran grub-install,
> but to no avail.
> 
> Anybody have a clue what could be going on here. From running chroot
> in the rescue cd it looks like all the proper files are in my /boot,
> so I'm quite stumped here.


Nobody deletes those files ( the files within the /boot directory ) , those
files get updated though in order to serve the various OSes you want to
boot . So the last installation that you performed , the fresh Fedora 
Core 3
one changed the /boot/grub/grub.conf file in order to facilitate it's 
needes and
that probably caused the condition you are facing.
One last thing that comes accross is the initrd file .
In your posting you are refering to sda . If i am correct this means the 
first SCSI disk
of your system . Do you have proper initrd files that load the necessary 
modules that are
needed in order to access your SCSI disk ?

Kind Regards,
   Kostas