Yesterday I had a bit of a clear out of my hard disk in order to make more room. This involved moving/deleting a lot of old files, shrinking one partition, moving several others, and both moving and growing the partition that cooker lives on. This all went successfully with the exception of cooker which will now no longer boot.

I have run e2fsck on the partition several times with the -f switch, it is always reported as clean.
The partition is mounted and fully visible when I boot into Mandriva 2008.0. All the files in /boot are accessible and I can see no errors in them.
I have 3 disc images of the partition, all of which I have tried and none of which are bootable, whereas they all used to be.

When I run grub from a terminal in 2008.0 I get this ( the cooker partition is (hd0,12))



Which seems to indicate that there is nothing wrong with the file system.

But when I continue this is what turns up:



Now I know that /boot/grub/stage1 exists because I can see it. I also know (courtesy of kdiff) that it is a binary equal to the same stage1 file that successfully launches 2008.0.

So why can't grub see it?

I am not at home at the moment and I don't have my copy of super grub disc with me. Neither do I have sufficient bandwidth on the internet to do any downloads, so I can't use that method to try and boot it.

At the moment I can see myself having to reinstall as I can't work out what is happening, especially in view of the fact that earlier disc images don't work either, but if anyone has an idea of what I can do about it, please let me know.

I've removed my comment. On first reading, I misinterpreted your post. (I don't see an option to delete a message.)

Jim

Well, I didn't see your comment so it doesn't matter too much.

The more I look at this problem the more I think there must be some data corruption, though it doesn't say much for e2fsck that it can't find it.

I'll probably reinstall from scratch when I get home, it is not a big deal.

Anyway thanks for the reply.

PS I hope the weather is better in Fife than it is in Cornwall where I am at the moment!!

Well, I got home and tried 'super grub disk' and it couldn't boot it either, so I resigned myself to a reinstall. After I reinstalled (with my usual procedure of installing grub to the first sector of the partition rather than the first sector of the drive then copying the 'menu.lst' entry to the version that I have in use) I booted again and got a very similar error (grub error 2). So I reinstalled a second time and this time allowed it to place grub on the 1st sector of the disk and this time it booted properly.

I don't quite know what conclusions to draw from that except that it obviously doesn't like it if it isn't on the root of the hard drive although I am sure I am not the only person in the world that does that.

Anyway it now works again.

A related question to this - Unlike most other distros I have used Mandriva uses a slightly different layout in 'menu.lst' . First it provides a generic information line like this:



then later it provides a kernel specific line like this:



Both of these appear in the boot menu and both seem to work providing you are using the Cooker 'menu.lst'. When previously I copied my menu.lst entry into my working menu.lst I used the kernel specific entry. Should I have used the non-specific one or even both?

And why does it have two entries anyway?