FC3->FC4 upgrade GRUB hang

[arioch]

OK...I did spend some time reading the forums first, but I just don't see anything quite like what I have....so here is my situation.

I've been running FC3 for some time as a dual boot with Win XP. That install was done by installing XP first, and then installing FC3 ..and grub was used as the boot loader. I think there are 3 partitions (the windows partition, a boot partition, and the linux partition..in that order)

Just today I decided to upgrade to FC4. I just selected upgrade...and told it to update grub as well....everything seemed to proceed just fine...until I rebooted and I got GRUB _ ...and that is it.

If boot in linux rescue mode from the FC4 disk, and go into the grub shell....and do a find /boot/grub/stage1, it says it can't find it anywhere.

I also tried find /grub/stage1, and that said it was on (hd1,1). As far as I can tell...I don't even have (hd1,1).

Any suggestions? I could just try re-writing the MBR...but I have a sneaking suspicion that will not work because grub somehow isn't seeing my partitions correctly.

BTW, my device.map file contains
(fd0) /dev/fd0
(hd0) /dev/sda

My hardware is an Dell Inspiron 9300.

[jim]

what does the grub.conf you ahve say for bootable kernels?
does grub even list the FC 4 intial release? 2.6-11-1.1369.FC4

[nvmkpk]

hd1 is second hard disk. Do you have more than one hard disk?

[arioch]

Ok...I think I got it. I'll post what I found here in case it can help others

At first, I was tempted to try what was posted elsewhere on this forum. In particular, the thread

How to install GRUB on the MBR (http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=975)

seemed like it might work for me. However...from the very start it didn't seem to be working right on my system. The command

find /boot/grub/stage1

doesn't seem to work as suggested....or at least it didn't for me. When booting from the rescue dvd...it didn't find anything. The command find /grub/stage1 worked, but it always says (hd1)...which just isn't right. When I went ahead and tried root (hd0,1) because I KNOW that is where my linux root is...it just told me that was invalid.

Anyway....I downloaded and burnt a bootable grub iso image. Burned this on a cdrom, and booted from it. Again...find doesn't seem to work. find /grub/stage1 finds it on /fd0...whatever the heck that means.

However, when I tried root (hd0,1)...it WORKED from the bootable grub cd. I then did a setup (hd0) and everything seemed to work just fine.

I'm still not really sure what went wrong...and why I was able to fix it with the grub iso cd and not the rescue DVD...but that's what I found. For the record, I just downloaded the iso from:

this link (http://www.vigla.eclipse.co.uk/)