Upgrade fedora 15 to 16, Can't boot fedora anymore

[myden]

Hi, I just used preupgrade to upgrade my fedora 15 to 16. I got bootloader error. I can't boot into fedora anymore after reboot.

My environment:

Dual system: Windows vista and fedora 15

using windows boot menu to boot dual system, fedora grub installed in it's partition.

Is there anyone know how to fix this problem? Thanks.

[nonamedotc]

Is this what you are experiencing?

Common Fedora 16 bugs.

[myden]

Thanks for the reply. I am not sure this is the reason. I installed preupgrade via yum. I guess it would grab the latest version. The current fact is that I can't boot into fedora anymore. How can I fix it? Thanks.

[nonamedotc]

You could try reinstalling the GRUB assuming your installation went fine. You can see the first response to the question posted here as a guide to reinstall GRUB. Hopefully this will fix it.

I am suggesting this since you say you are getting a bootloader error. What error messages do you get when you try to boot in to fedora?

[myden]

This problem is driving me crazy. I tried to reinstall grub after booting through usb live fedora 16. It doesn't work. It's still showing grub 0.97 version and only two menu items shown as usual, one is "update to fedora 16", the other one is "windows". It shows "Error 15: can't find files" after choosing the "update to fedora 16" menu. It will return to windows bootloader menu after choosing the "windows" menu.

Finally I decided to do a fresh installation. However, I am shocked it won't work too. It jumped into grub command UI instead of booting into fedora 16 after choosing "Fedora" menu on windows bootloader menu. And the grub version is still 0.97.

The following is my computer environment and how I do a fresh installation:

Sda (windows bootloader)

sda1: 30G windows
sda2: 300G windows
sda3: 50G / and /boot ext4 (grub on this)
sda4: 3G swap

I used usb live fedora 16 DVD image to boot into installation and upgrade UI.

1. choose refresh installation

2. choose replace exist linux, it automatically recreated linux partition like the following:

Sda
sda1: 30G windows
sda2: 300G windows
sda3: 500M /boot (I choose write grub on this)
sda4: 52.5G / LVM

3. successfully finish installation and reboot

Could anyone know what wrong with that? Why the grub is still 0.97 and how can I fix it? Thanks.

[rgaelzer]

I don't know if this still applies to you, but I had the same problem just now and was able to solve it quite smoothly by following the instructions given on Comment 83 of the bug report:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=737731

Just ignore if the grub2-install command issues some warnings. They are discussed previously in the same report.

Hope this is still useful for you...

[safulop]

I posted a complete set of instructions for this problem a while ago, just search for "Fedora grub troubles" or my username.

-Sean

[wierdlmate]

Where do I search for your answer? How do I get into this rescue mode everybody is talking about? I have the very same problem the original poster had: after an upgrade via preupgrade I cannot boot into my system and I see the same grub .9* version. There is no rescue mode when I boot the live cd. Do I get a rescue mode from the dvd perhaps?

Thx for any help.

[nonamedotc]

Originally Posted by wierdlmate

Where do I search for your answer? How do I get into this rescue mode everybody is talking about? I have the very same problem the original poster had: after an upgrade via preupgrade I cannot boot into my system and I see the same grub .9* version. There is no rescue mode when I boot the live cd. Do I get a rescue mode from the dvd perhaps?

Thx for any help.

Yes you do! Here is the link to rescue mode link to the rescue mode instructions from Fedora Documentation page. Hope this will be of some help.

Cheers.

[safulop]

You don't need a rescue mode, you need to enter the correct boot commands so your system boots. You might, however, need a rescue mode to get the information you need about your system to get the commands right.

Search for my post in this forum, "fedora grub troubles" for complete set of instructions.

[wierdlmate]

Guys.

The link to Fedora's rescue mode is outdated because you type "linux rescue" nowhere.

I bet mine was a common problem: it turns out that there was not enough space for grub2 to put its files. What was needed was to shrink my boot partition by just a MB. Apparently, the first partition cannot start on sector 63 anymore with grub2.

Now, the rescue mode doesn't seem to help here, because parted doesn't offer the "resize" option. So what I needed to do was make a gparted live cd, http://sourceforge.net/projects/gpar...d-live-stable/, then boot with that. Then move or resize the boot partition (or wherever you put grub). Once that is done, grub needs to be reconfigured and installed. In my case this meant (could have used the rescue cd as well)

mkdir /mnt/sysimage

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/sysimage

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sysimage/boot

mount --bind /dev /mnt/sysimage/dev

mount --bind /proc /mnt/sysimage/proc

mount --bind /sys /mnt/sysimage/sys

chroot /mnt/sysimage/

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

grub2-install /dev/sda


Make