message GRUB - no boot. Help

[Jeff Vian]

On Tue, 2005-01-18 at 14:08 +0100, Francois Massonneau wrote:
> Hi,
> This morning, suddenly, after many years without a problem, my system doesn't 
> want to boot.
> My system is full SCSI, and I run FC3 (I did an upgrade from FC2 to  FC3).
> 
> Now, when I power on, after the disks checking by the Adaptec SCSI card, the 
> only message I have is "GRUB", and the system stays that way, with a 
> continuous noise.
> I've started with the FC3 first install disk in rescue mode, and I can browse 
> thru the directories, but I don't know how to repare that grub loader, and 
> make my system to work again, as before.
> Thank you for your help. Francois
> 
Any noise needs to be investigated, as does a sudden failure to boot.

Depending on how old the drives are, you may want to run fsck on all
your partitions, and suspect a drive failure if ANY of the partitions
require fix to the filesystems.

You may also be able to run smartctl and test the drives if they are
smart capable.

fsck should be run with the partition dismounted.  smartctl can be run
by either booting to a live-cd distro such as knoppix, or by booting in
rescue mode then doing the chroot trick so your installation is
available then using smartctl on each drive of concern.

If all you want to do is reinstall grub on the boot sector then boot to
rescue mode, chroot /mnt/sysimage, then run grub-install /dev/<disk
name>  (where disk name is something like sda, sdb, or whichever is your
boot device.

One last and very important question.  Did the problem just occur with
no changes?  or did it occur when you rebooted after doing the upgrade?

no changes -->  likely hardware problem
after upgrade --> likely software problem & fix.