[linux] help with grub

[Helen Petropoulos]

Hi again,

Josh Larios was here today to look at the machine and it turns out that 
there is a FAT partition with a linux distribution
and some rudimentary DOS commands.  What Josh believes happened is that 
the machine somehow booted into this
installer partition and began a new installation of Linux, but didn't 
complete.  Most everything was wiped out on the disk.

Thanks to Josh and to everyone for all of the helpful advice.  I 
learned a lot.

Best wishes,

Helen

On Jul 12, 2007, at 12:36 PM, Gordon Messmer wrote:

> Helen Petropoulos wrote:
>> Thanks Gordon (and Josiah).  The tab completion only works to 
>> complete the word "kernel".  It won't give me any
>> more options.  I tried kernel /vm and tab completion, but it just 
>> came back with an error that it could not find the file.
>
> I recommend trying the tab at "kernel=/".  If you use only a slash, 
> without the "vm", then grub will show you all of the files on the 
> filesystem which you specified using "(root hd0,0)".
>
> Using tab completion, you should be able to determine whether the 
> filesystem contains kernel images (vmlinuz*) in which case it is 
> /boot, or the root filesystem's contents (/boot, /etc, /usr...), or 
> nothing at all, in which case it's probably either swap or corrupt.
>
>> /boot should be on the /root system.  As far as I know, it is not a 
>> separate partition.  This RHE was configured by DELL
>> and actually belongs to another user.
>
> Dell tends to use a complex partition layout, but I don't specifically 
> recall whether or not they put /boot on its own partition by default.
>
>> I did a backup of the entire system a while back and was able to look 
>> into the (old) grub.conf.  Gordon, thanks for pointing
>> out that there is no /dev/hda0.  I assumed that partitions are 0 
>> indexed, as they are on my solaris machine.  Nevertheless, I also
>> tried /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2 and neither could find the file.
>
> If you can't mimic what you see in the old grub.conf, then it's 
> possible that the partition table is corrupt, or that the filesystem 
> is, or that the files were simply accidentally removed.
>
>