[PLUG] FC5 Boot problem -- Resolved

[William A Morita]

Wil,
Thank you for your help.
I was able to solve my partition type problem using sfdisk.

The grub entry was helpful. What you gave me required change because my box
is a dual core, thus needed "smp" version of the kernel.
I also had to change the root entry: "root=/dev/sda9"
I have avoided the LVM usage because it messes with my understanding of disk
addressing especially when I use Knoppix.

Thanks again,

- Bill Morita

wamorita at hevanet.com 
Home: (503) 697-6994
Cell: (503) 260-3876



-----Original Message-----
From: Wil Cooley [mailto:wcooley at nakedape.cc] 
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2006 11:09 PM
To: wamorita at hevanet.com; General Linux/UNIX discussion and help; civil and
on-topic
Subject: Re: [PLUG] FC5 Boot problem

On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 15:55 -0800, William A Morita wrote:
> I have loaded FC5 into a free partition in my FC4 machine.
> I find I have no way to boot the FC5 load in sda9.  
> 
> The machine was already a XP/FC4 multiboot machine.
> During the install I told it not to install the boot loader.
> What I ended up with is an FC5 install in the new partition, complete 
> with its own /boot directory.
> While there is a grub subdirectory, but it is empty except for the 
> splash.xpm.gz .
> 
> How do I boot sda9?

I'm assuming you have GRUB as the bootloader from FC4?  You'll want to edit
/etc/grub.conf and add an entry like:

title Fedora Core 5 (2.6.15-1.2054_FC5)
        root (hd0,8)
        kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5 ro root=/dev/rootvg/rootlv
        initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5.img

Assuming that your hda9 (which, in grub, is hd0,8--it indexes from zero) is
just one large filesystem.

> Booting into the existing FC4 on sda7, and fdisk -l gives:
> 
> Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 240 heads, 63 
> sectors/track, 20673 cylinders Units = cylinders of 15120 * 512 = 
> 7741440 bytes
> 
>    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/sda1               1        1015     7673368+   b  W95 FAT32
> /dev/sda2   *        1016        3757    20729520    7  HPFS/NTFS
> /dev/sda3            3758       18213   109287360    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
> /dev/sda5            3758        4031     2071408+  83  Linux
> /dev/sda6            4032        4309     2101648+  82  Linux swap /
Solaris
> /dev/sda7            4310        7018    20480008+  83  Linux
> /dev/sda8            7019        9727    20480008+  83  Linux
> /dev/sda9            9728       12436    20480008+   b  W95 FAT32  
> /dev/sda10          12437       18213    43674088+   b  W95 FAT32
> 
> I am also puzzled why sda9 continues to read as a W95 partition.
> I can mount it with : mount /dev/sda9 /scr -t ext3

It's just a few bits in the partition table; AFAIK the only thing that
actually cares are the MD and LVM layers, although it can be easier to keep
up with what you've got.

I had the dickens of a time last night installing FC5, mainly because I
didn't want to burn the ISOs to actual CDs.  Since the installer can use a
directory of the ISOs themselves (handling the loopback mounting
automatically), I thought I could just install from the filesystem where I
downloaded them.  Wrong: All of my filesystems except /boot are LVM volumes,
which is loaded from the stage 2 part of the installer.  Damn; well, I
though I could use my USB drive, sine I'd already copied them there for
transporting.  Still wrong: USB storage isn't probes until stage 2.  In the
end, I copied the ISOs to another host and installed over NFS :\

BTW, you can avoid having to burn installation media just by booting the
install kernel and initrd from the first ISO with GRUB (I renamed my files
to be more descriptive):

title Fedora Core 5 Installer
        kernel /fc5-install-vmlinuz
        initrd /fc5-install-initrd

Of course, if I hadn't been so lazy, I could've just used my netboot
server...

Wil
--
Wil Cooley <wcooley at nakedape.cc>
Naked Ape Consulting, Ltd. <http://nakedape.cc>