Installed FC4 all I get is grub>... Help

[Mike McCarty]

Don wrote:

> I tried setup (hd1,10 and got
> Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... no
>
> How do I know what the parameters should be?
> Thanks

This is indeed a sticky question, as the only answer is "however
you set up your machine".

GRUB has the ability to do some "find" operations.

You need to

find /boot/grub/stage1
and
find /boot/grub/stage2

Your BIOS loads only one sector from disc, and jumps to it.
This is not enough room for GRUB to do its job, so it loads
stage1 which can read more file system stuff, and which then
loads stage2 which does more of the real work. Without those
two stages, GRUB can't work. So you need to find where they are.

We can't possibly tell you where to look, because we don't know
your setup. And if you knew your setup, you wouldn't have a problem.

However, I can possibly help you find out what your setup is, and
get past this.

You have to tell GRUB where to look on your hard drive. You do this
with the "root" command. But to use that, you need to know how
GRUB names discs.

Your first drive is named (hd0). Your second drive is named (hd1).
Partition names are like disc names, but they have a partition number
in them, like this "(hd0,0)". This is the name of the first partition
on disc 1. The third partition on disc 2 would be named "(hd1,2)".

So, set the root of your file system to each partition you have and try
the "find" command, like this:

root (hd0,0)
find /boot/grub/stage1

If this fails, then try

root (hd0,1)
find /boot/grub/stage1

Keep trying each partition of your first hard disc. If you run off
your first hard disc, then try your second hard disc like this

root (hd1,0)
find /boot/grub/stage1

root (hd1,1)
find /boot/grub/stage1

until you get a hit.

If you never find /boot/grub/stage1 then you have an incomplete
install of GRUB, and you won't be able to get off the ground.

Now, you may not know what your partition setup is. I suggest
you use a rescue disc of some sort. Can you boot from CDROM?
If so, then boot a rescue disc and use whatever utilities are present
to find out what your hard disc setup is.

Now, supposing that you find a hit, and you can find both
/boot/grub/stage1 and /boot/grub/stage2 then you are nearly
there.

You next need to load a kernel. You do this with the kernel
command. First, issue the "root" command which worked with
the "find" above. Then

kernel /vmlinuz...

Where the "..." represents stuff that is peculiar to your kernel distro.
I don't know what to put there, but I believe that GRUB will try
auto-completion if you use the TAB key. After the name of the kernel,
you need to put whatever arguments to the kernel it needs. On my
machine, for example, I need "acpi=off".

 If that works, then you need to load your initial RAM disc

initrd /initrd...

where again you probably need to  use auto-completion to find the exact
name.

At this point, you are ready to go, and can issue the "boot" command.

boot

A complete set of commands for my machine, which boots FC2 is:

root (hd0,2)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.10-1.771_FC2  ro  root=LABEL=/  acpi=off rhgb quiet
initrd initrd-2.6.10-1.771_FC2.img
boot

You probably need the "ro", you probably need the "root=LABEL=/", you
may or may not need the "acpi=off", and "rhgb quiet" just makes things
a little less noisy.

Hope that helped some.

Mike

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