FC5 fails to boot after install

[Dan]

Mike McCarty wrote:
> dpeck wrote:
>> "What does your grub.conf file look like? Have you
>> tried to boot by hand?"
>>
>> what is the command for manually booting linux?  again i'm new, so i 
>> probably wont completely understand half of what you say.  
>
> Well it takes a few, not just one.
>
> I'm sure someone here will say I'm completely off base, and
> that you just need to do something simple which will work
> (well, 95% of the time, anyway). But I like to be methodical and
> understand what is wrong and figure out how to fix it.
>
> You might get your machine up faster listening to one of
> those people. You might have a better understanding of
> how your machine boots and what to do when it won't if
> you are more methodical.
My theory as well.
>
> I see that you need a more-or-less complete tutorial
> on how to run GRUB. I can't give you one here, so read
> the manual, as they say. However, I'll step you through some
> basics.
>
> First, GRUB is not an operating system, and it knows very little
> about file systems. It deals with discs, and uses a non-OS specific
> method to deal with them.
>
> So, naming conventions...
>
> Hard disc names are (hd<driveno>), like this
>
>     (hd0)
>
> This is the name of the first hard drive. The second
> hard drive is called
>
>     (hd1)
>
> Partitions on the drives are named like this
>
>     (hd<driveno>,<partitionno>)
>
> For example, the third partition on the second drive is
> named
>     (hd1,2)
>
> GRUB boots in two (or more) stages. The first stage is
> loaded into memory by the BIOS (at location 07C0:0000) and the
> second stage gets loaded after that by the first
> stage. The second stage is peculiar to the file system used,
> and knows how to read it. The directory separator is
> "/". So, on my machine, my /boot is on /dev/hda3, so
> /boot/grub/grub.conf appears to GRUB as
>
>     (hd0,2)/grub/grub.conf
>
> GRUB needs to be configured to know where to look for that
> file, because of course, it can't read file systems until
> the code to read file systems is read in. This is done with
> the GRUB program (not to be confused with the GRUB boot code),
> and which is used to install a configured GRUB, either to the MBR,
> or to a BR within a partition.
>
> My spash screen is thus on
>
>     (hd0,2)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
>
> Now, having all those (hd0,2) in names is redundant,
> so GRUB has a means to specify a sort of default directory
> like in Linux when you cd to a directory, then names become
> relative to that path, only in this case it is a partition/
> file system relative. This is done with the root command:
>
>         root (hd0,2)
>
> It's not necessary, but it saves some typing.
>
> Ok, now to boot Linux, one needs two things (this is one
> of the areas where Linux departs from the multiboot standard,
> I believe).
>
> One of them is the location of the kernel (ok so far)
> and the other is the location of the inital RAM disc
> (not part of the multiboot standard). These are
> specified by the kernel and inird commands.
>
> So, I can boot my Linux machine by using these commands...
>
>     root (hd0,2)
>         kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.10-1.771_FC2 ro root=LABEL=/ acpi=off rhgb 
>         quiet
>     initrd /initrd-2.6.10-1.771_FC2.img
>     boot
>
> The first simply specifies a disc "path" to which everything is
> relative, the second specifies where the kernel is, and what boot
> parameters to pass to it (my machine has a broken ACPI BIOS interface,
> so I have to turn that off, "rhgb" specifies to use a graphical boot
> rather than the text boot etc.). The third specifies the initial
> RAM disc to use. The fourth tells GRUB that I'm through specifying
> stuff, and to proceed with the boot, and load the kernel.
>
>
>> it's kinda hard to view files from a linux install from windows.  
>
> :-)
>
> But you *can* boot the Fedora rescuecd, and you can also use the
> install disc, but with rescue on the boot command line.
>
You can also install the ext2 driver at http://www.fs-driver.org . It 
doesn't support ext3 journaling, but can still read it fine, and can 
write to it without the journaling. If you don't have any specific 
reason to write to your linux partitions, I'd just leave the write 
support off, since Windows can muck up the filesystems, especially if it 
crashes. I have ext2 partitions which I use in both Windows and Linux, 
and ext3 partitions that I don't even let Windows read. The driver has a 
nifty IFS thing that it adds to Control Panel, to quickly and easily 
bind letter drives to ext2/3 partitions.
>> what do you mean by disc setup...boot priority? originally it was:
>> 1. [CDROM]
>> 2. [CDROM]
>> 3. [Floppy] after this is an assumption
>> 4. [HDD-0]
>> 5. [HDD-1]
>>
>> should i change it to 1. [CDROM]
>> 2. [HDD-1]
>> 3. [HDD-0]
>>
>> then retry the install?
Grub will by default try to install to the MBR of the first disk (HDD-0 
probably). If you have the BIOS set to boot from a disk where grub did 
not install to, it won't boot grub, needless to say. If instead Windows 
installed to that MBR, then it'll just boot Windows. You can change in 
the advanced boot loader options what order it sees the hard drives in 
(to match the order you want to set in BIOS). Then, you can install to 
the MBR of HDD-1 or wherever you so desire.

[snip]

-Dan