Grub Error - Boot failure

[Arthur Dent]

On Mon, 2012-06-18 at 12:47 -0700, Joe Zeff wrote:
> On 06/18/2012 12:32 PM, Arthur Dent wrote:
> > Can anyone guide me through troubleshooting and hopfully fixing this
> > without hosing my system?
> 
> Two questions: first, can you boot into an earlier kernel?  Second, if 
> you can't, do you have access to a LiveCD?  (Doesn't even have to be 
> Fedora; just something that can get you to a working system.)

Well this is weird!

I was thinking along the same lines. I found a F14 liveCD and that
booted just fine. Had a little poke around the disks using the disk
utility (which reported both hard drives as healthy) and then decided to
try the original F16 installation disk (not a liveCD) as a rescue disk.
Rescue mode failed with a "Fatal error" (Sorry I didn't write it down)
but I just saw a strange error about mounting one of the other
partitions on the disk (I have this partition mounted from fstab). So I
went back to the liveCD, and edited the fstab, commenting out the
relevant entry and...
The system boots fine!
(Here's the weird bit) I then uncommented the same line (so it once
again tries to mount the partition) and...
It still works fine!

So what gives?

Answering your first question - no I could not boot into an earlier
kernel. The grub failure seemed to be before that choice even came up -
so why would grub be worried about a partition mounted from fstab which
is surely much later in the boot process?

Why do I have a working system again simply by changing fstab and then
changing it back again?

I have a working system and that's the main thing - but if anyone can
shed any light as to what went wrong I would be very grateful.

Joe, thanks for your help.

Thanks again to all.

Mark

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