FC5 Installs but will not boot

telespan · #1 15th April 2006, 10:47 AM

I have updated my original FC4 installation with FC5 x64 and the install went fine. When I re-booted, the boot progress stopped with continuously repeated 'GRUB' messages.

My system is an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ with a SATA 120Gb drive from Seagate configured with LVM. Memory is 1Gb.

JEO · #2 15th April 2006, 11:14 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by telespan

I have updated my original FC4 installation with FC5 x64 and the install went fine. When I re-booted, the boot progress stopped with continuously repeated 'GRUB' messages.

My system is an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ with a SATA 120Gb drive from Seagate configured with LVM. Memory is 1Gb.

How about a sample of the grub messages?

telespan · #3 15th April 2006, 12:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JEO

How about a sample of the grub messages?

A sample is 'GRUB' repeated continuously ad-infinitum until I re-boot.

I think it may be something to do with the NVidea chip I have.

hussram · #4 15th April 2006, 01:47 PM

When I upgraded from FC4 to FC5, I experienced a similar problem where GRUB freezes at the initial boot. I re-initialized GRUB (using GRUB command from installation DVD) but that did not help. I fixed the problem by running grub_install from the installation DVD (using Linux Rescue).

alikilaij · #5 15th April 2006, 04:10 PM

Same thing here. I also did grub-install. That was not the end to my issue though. I found that once I did get the GRUB menu I had to manually edit the boot parameters for Fedora from hd1 to hd2. It has been a few weeks so I dont recall what exactly I had to change, but I knew I had to edit the parameters from the output of grub-install.

I am running a nforce-3 250 nvidia chipset here.

I hope you backed up any data you had if you are dual booting, if not I would do so before using grub-install, it jacked up my XP partition.

telespan · #6 16th April 2006, 11:48 AM

I have done some corrections using the rescue CD performing the following fix:

grub-install --recheck /dev/sda

which did bring up the Grub menu on reboot. However, I now get the following error:-

Booting 'Fedora Core (2.6.15-1.2054_FC5)'

root (hd1,0)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5 ro root=/dev/sda1

Error 15: File not found

Press any key to continue...

When I did fdisk -l in the linux rescue, I got the following result:

Disk /dev/hdd: 40.0 GB, 40037760000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4867 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdd1 * 1 4867 39094146 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sda: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24321 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 14 24321 195254010 8e Linux LVM

Can anyone here tell me what I need to do now to get my system to boot fully and allow me to login to FC5?

Thanks

JEO · #7 17th April 2006, 01:16 AM

Well the linux lvm partition probably contains your / partition so that is the device that you want to pass to the kernel command line. Do a vgscan command and possibly vgchange -ay command and an ls /dev/mapper command and see if you see an entry like /dev/mapper/VolGroup00 something or other it will be one of those that you have to change in the kernel command line. example:
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5 ro root=/dev/sda1

change to
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5 ro root=/dev/mapper/VolGroup00

For the file not found message it could also be that the /vmlinuz... kernel file isn't in the /boot partition directory or the /initrd.. file isn't there. If you edit the kernel command line from grub you can press tab key or something and it will show the list of files that it sees, so check that.

telespan · #8 17th April 2006, 09:03 AM

Jeo, thanks for that information.

Overnight, though, I did another re-install where I re-ordered the two disks that I have on this box. The LVM drive which is SATA, now becomes hd0 and the old 40Gb IDE drive is now hd1. It seems that the reason the previous installs did not allow boot may have been that the MBR was installed on the IDE drive and FC5 could not cope with the complication.

This reinstall now works and I can log in to FC5. My problem now is that networking does not seem to work - I think I can work around that one today.

gabriel2007 · #9 15th April 2006, 10:45 PM

When I finished installing FC5 , just the word GRUB showed up , nothing else, I had to break the raid on the BIOS in order to be able to boot.