New grub problem on FC7 - suggestions anyone?

[David Timms]

William W. Austin wrote:
...
> New problem: grub no longer boots the system.  I tried again after full 
> power-down.  Same result.  Eventually after the usual HW/bios startup 
> messages I get a black screen, and the word GRUB appears.  Then several 
> seconds another GRUB is added.  I let this run while I ran an errand - 
> and it continued that way "GRUB   GRUB    ... etc" for over an hour.  
> There were _no_ error messages.  I was able to reboot using the rescue 
> CD, and did full fsck's of all drives.  Luckily I have another working 
> system here with a burner and I created a boot CD so that I can get the 
> machine to boot.
> 
> After I got the machine to boot using a boot cd, I did a grub-install, 
> but the results are different - I get Error 17 (which is cannot mount 
> selected partition).
Is that error during the grub-install, or while trying to boot ?

{As on off-side, I am using that kernel on i386/athlon and core2duo for 
the last week OK}.

After grub-install do you get to the grub select/boot screen during boot ?

Do you have multiple physical drives ?
Maybe post fdisk -l, and /boot/grub/grub.conf

Which kernel is the previous kernel you had been running ?

You might like to make a grub boot floppy/cd. Then you enter commands like:
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vm {tab}
inited /in {tab}
boot

This would prove that the partition numbers are OK.
Does you /boot/grub/device.map exist and contain something like ? :
# this device map was generated by anaconda
(hd0)     /dev/sda

DaveT.