while looking on the web I found this:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=737203
it says that's calling the old grub-probe script from /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober -- I looked at that script and didn't see any entries so I loaded a live cd to see if I could get grub reinstalled but when I tried the script spit out an error saying that there was grub error on a line of /usr/share/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib
when I looked in there i saw that all the entries had grub_probe and there was only one for grub-probe (no entries for grub2_probe or grub2-probe) I noticed that if I changed it to grub2_probe or grub2-probe I still get the same outcome as if I changed it to grub_probe.
I don't know about scripting but someone on the bugzilla report said: I believe the fix grub2-probe should be ${grub_probe} instead rather than hard coding it as grub2-probe, as there is code early in grub2-mkconfig that allows for the proper substitution.
so that's why I only changed it to grub-probe because either way it works but I still get the errors when running the script, I know what I'm doing here is not quite a clean fix but I don't want to give up as I want to run fedora on this system so at first i got around it by copying grub.cfg from another machine and now it's generating the config file but because of my limited knowledge i don't know if the error messages will affect something else.
now I know this is a different script than the one on the bug report but it seems to help because it generates it's own complete config file, I just tried it and changed it to ${grub_probe} and it works but I get a different error:
[root@hiddencloud grub]# grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
Generating grub.cfg ...
/usr/share/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib: line 282: /usr/sbin/: Is a directory
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-2.fc17.x86_64
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-3.5.0-2.fc17.x86_64.img
/usr/share/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib: line 122: /usr/sbin/: Is a directory
/usr/share/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib: line 122: /usr/sbin/: Is a directory
/usr/share/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib: line 122: /usr/sbin/: Is a directory
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.4.6-2.fc17.x86_64
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-3.4.6-2.fc17.x86_64.img
/usr/share/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib: line 122: /usr/sbin/: Is a directory
/usr/share/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib: line 122: /usr/sbin/: Is a directory
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.4.4-5.fc17.x86_64
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-3.4.4-5.fc17.x86_64.img
/usr/share/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib: line 122: /usr/sbin/: Is a directory
/usr/share/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib: line 122: /usr/sbin/: Is a directory
/usr/share/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib: line 282: /usr/sbin/: Is a directory
done
[root@hiddencloud grub]# ls
Linear Mode
