Recovering/Restoring Boot Partition

[Don Levey]

On 1/29/2014 13:59, Chris Murphy wrote:
> 
> On Jan 29, 2014, at 11:41 AM, Don Levey <fedora-list at the-leveys.us>
> wrote:
> 
>> A short while ago, during a power cut, my desktop machine failed.
>> A power-up displayed symptoms consistent with a missing /boot
>> partition; attempting to boot under the rescue CD seemed to confirm
>> this when it did not mount the /boot partition.
>> 
>> ...
> 
> I'm wondering why /boot and not rootfs, and why it's not mounting.
> Normally /boot isn't being written to at all except when kernels are
> being installed, and /boot on ext4 or XFS should recover with a
> normal mount at boot without even requiring fsck.
> 
Chris, thank you for responding!

I was wondering something similar; perhaps there is physical damage?
One small fact I forgot to mention: this is a dual-boot machine (WinXP).
 The Windows side comes up without a problem.

> Anyway, if you're for sure convinced it's corrupt then reformat the
> partition. Use blkid to get the new volume UUID to insert into
> /etc/fstab so it gets mounted when you next boot. And then mount
> root, boot, (boot/efi if this is a UEFI machine), and use: mount -B
> /dev /mnt/dev    #where /mnt is where rootfs is mounted mount -B
> /proc /mnt/proc mount -B /sys /mnt/sys chroot /mnt yum reinstall
> kernel     #grubby will probably complain due to lack of grub.cfg 
> grub2-install /dev/sdX grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
> ...

I assume I'm reformatting using mkfs; I *think* I understand the rest.
But now another question arises:
Since the (previous) /boot partition was fairly small, is there any
reason not to just abandon it, remove /boot from fstab, and install the
kernel into the /boot subdirectory of /?
 -Don