I'm jumping through hoops here.

[glennzo]

Or dancing around the bullets being fired at my feet.

Installed Fedora 15 Beta test last night, rebooted, failed to boot so I turned the laptop off and watched some TV.

This morning it still won't boot to a GUI. Boots to the typical black screen with a flashing cursor. There's no way for me to log in as there are no VT's available so I power off the machine and decide that I'll just reinstall grub and move on. I have 5 or 6 other Linux releases installed on this same computer so getting something to boot shouldn't be a problem.

I grab my Fedora 14 i686 install DVD and boot with it choosing rescue mode. I choose to restore grub for Fedora 14 x86_64. No go. Can't run grub-install /dev/sda because it gives me an error. I try this three times with the same result. I reboot and try again, this time I'll restore Scientific Linux 6. That works and I'm able to boot SL6 without any trouble. Now that I'm in I'll recreate the boot menu so I can boot whatever I want. That is easy and works well, but what I notice while looking at grub conf for the newly installed F15 Beta (I'm adding that too, working or not) is that it says root (hd0,2). Zoinks! What happened here. I told the partitioner to use /dev/sda8 / hd0,7. No. I'm not mistaken. I told it to use /dev/sda8 and to format the partition to EXT4. No wonder it won't boot! My Fedora 15 Alpha install, which was working well until this fiasco, no longer allows me to log in. I type my user name and password and it loops back and presents me with the greeter again, looking for user name and password. That is / was installed on /dev/sda3.

[root@satellite64 ~]# mount -t ext4 /dev/sda8 /mnt/temp/
[root@satellite64 ~]# cat /mnt/temp/boot/grub/grub.conf
# grub.conf for Fedora 15 Alpha
default=0
timeout=0
splashimage=(hd0,2)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Fedora (2.6.38.2-9.fc15.i686.PAE)
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.38.2-9.fc15.i686.PAE ro root=UUID=b5cf2e9f-2350-4b35-bc3e-369df91f4daf rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_LVM rd_NO_MD rd_NO_DM LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYTABLE=us vga=791
initrd /boot/initramfs-2.6.38.2-9.fc15.i686.PAE.img

title Fedora 15 Alpha
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.38.2-8.fc15.i686.PAE ro root=UUID=b5cf2e9f-2350-4b35-bc3e-369df91f4daf rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_LVM rd_NO_MD rd_NO_DM LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYTABLE=us vga=791
initrd /boot/initramfs-2.6.38.2-8.fc15.i686.PAE.img

[root@satellite64 ~]# umount /mnt/temp/
[root@satellite64 ~]# mount -t ext4 /dev/sda3 /mnt/temp/
[root@satellite64 ~]# cat /mnt/temp/boot/grub/grub.conf
# grub.conf for Fedora 15 Alpha
default=0
timeout=0
splashimage=(hd0,2)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Fedora (2.6.38.2-9.fc15.i686.PAE)
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.38.2-9.fc15.i686.PAE ro root=UUID=b5cf2e9f-2350-4b35-bc3e-369df91f4daf rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_LVM rd_NO_MD rd_NO_DM LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYTABLE=us vga=791
initrd /boot/initramfs-2.6.38.2-9.fc15.i686.PAE.img

title Fedora 15 Alpha
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.38.2-8.fc15.i686.PAE ro root=UUID=b5cf2e9f-2350-4b35-bc3e-369df91f4daf rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_LVM rd_NO_MD rd_NO_DM LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYTABLE=us vga=791
initrd /boot/initramfs-2.6.38.2-8.fc15.i686.PAE.img


I'm not complaining and not looking for possible solutions, just dancing the dance and walking the walk. At least I have alternatives. If one doesn't work I'll just boot something else.

Oh! For what it's worth, this was the F15 Beta TC1 NetInstall ISO that I used.

[DBelton]

glennzo, It looks like it picked up your other F15 install and just automajikally used it instead of what you told it to use. :(

If it did this, that is a bug and you should file a bug report for it.

While I could see it automatically adding your other F15 install to your new /boot/grub/grub.conf, it should not do as you mentioned and basically replaced your new /boot/grub/grub.conf with your other install. (the 2 grub.conf files above look to be identical)


Edit:
You could try just adding the lines to boot your new F15 install to the grub.conf that is on sda8 and see if it will boot then. In the grub.conf on sda8 change it to boot hd0,7 instead of 0,2 and make sure the kernel and initrd lines match up to the version you have on sda8. (I assume that /boot and / are in the same partition on your installs? ie, not using a separate /boot partition?)

[glennzo]

I installed with the Netinstall ISO. I've since downloaded the full install ISO and will likely reinstall with it. I should probably just overwrite the Alpha partition since Alpha is hosed now too. :dis: It's all good. We'll see what happens with the full install and maybe I'll do the bug report thing too. I most certainly am not mistaken with regard to my target partition choice, that I'm sure of. I always exercise caution and pay closer attention to what I'm doing with a multi-boot system so something like this doesn't happen and I don't have a "d'oh" moment. As a matter of fact, before I reboot to install I open a terminal and fdisk -l and I look at boot menus and mounts so I'm sure of what partition(s) are available. Then I write it down.