MBR gone and rescue disc not happy - HELP!!!!

[Andrew Kelly]

On Fri, 2007-08-24 at 10:44 +0000, Paul F. Johnson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > > No changes to the drives, BIOS or anything like that. Did an update via yum (I
> > > think it was on Saturday), reset and nothing - failed to boot completely.
> > 
> > GRUB and a hang implies it is choking very early indeed. The MBR is 
> > ok because it said GRUB, but after that its a bit suspect and it 
> > seems its not finding the the right blocks for GRUB (or something
> attached/changed
> > the BIOS config order - eg a USB bootable device - one box here fails
> > much the way you describe if I accidentally leave a USB key in it during
> > boot)
> 
> I've disconnected everything except the main HD and the video card. No other
> cards or drives are in the box. I get the same result. I'll try killing USB next.
>  
> > The fsck result is hopeful - but did you just get an immediate 
> > "clean" return from ext3 or did you force a full check ? (-f option) ?
> 
> Did it with -f and it was clean.
> 
> > "It does complain that some of the points have not been mounted due 
> > to a problem"
> > 
> > Actual exact message text is good, thats why error handlers don't
> > just all print "It broke"
> 
> The error is along the lines of some of the devices have failed to mount. I'm
> assuming that when the rescue disc boots, it reads the fstab on the drive it's
> trying to mount and use them. The only one which looks like it's failed to
> mount is /dev/hda1 which is where the /boot directory is.
> 
> TTFN
> 
> Paul

Hmm, that make sense. Without access to /boot, the second stage loader
is unavailable.

I've just quickly scanned all the mails in this thread (on my machine,
may not be all of them), and I didn't see anything about how your disks
are set up. But I *do* remember reading something about an ext2
partition and a LVM setup.
Can you please give me the skinny on that again?

Is /dev/hda1 what you mount at /boot, or does it just contain /boot?
Is that the drive which passed the fsck -f you've written about already?

When booted into rescue, can you hand-mount /dev/hda1, or does it fail
their, as well? 

Can you past your /etc/fstab in here as well, please?

Andy