i've grubbed up a machine
I'm running a relatively recent sarge (upgraded fully within the last
month - it had been woody for a few years prior)
I thought I'd use grub instead of lilo (because I'm trying to figure out
some of the more advanced features and took a reboot opportunity to
install it prior to doing any more new kernels).
Unfortunately I have a large hard disk with a single partition, and
didn't read carefully enough before proceeding.
After "apt-get install grub; grub-install /dev/hda ; update-grub" I
thought I'd be fine (having done this sequence on several other machines
over the last few weeks). But when I rebooted I got "grub Error 18"
which I've learned means that grub doesn't like it when there's no
support in the BIOS for the large drive.
The way my disk is partitioned, hda1 is a small swap partition (which I
could presumably steal some space from in order to make a new boot
partition) and hda2 has many Gigs mounted @ / (or it should if I could
boot)
So I thought I'd re-run lilo (from a rescue CD), but I made a mistake
there too. Thinking I had a "salvare" CD in (debian-based) I mounted
hda2 and then chrooted into it (but didn't mount /proc or anything, so
it still had info from the boot cd there I presume (or none at all?) --
i'm not actually sure how relevant that is).
The rescue CD I actually had in was Trinity (1.1 build98 i think?) which
looks to be Redhat based.
After running lilo from my chroot (which seemed to find my 6 or so
kernels in boot properly just as update-grub had previously) I now get a
kernel panic on reboot. (seems to be looking for a reiser file-system
somewhere and dying, don't know what that's about) Maybe there was an
issue with mismatched lilo versions, maybe it was something else. I'll
transcribe the messages that appear on the screen prior to the kernel
panic (doesn't matter which of the kernels I try, they all seem to die
at about the same place) if anyone needs it (it seems this post is long
enough already though).
I haven't actually changed any info in the partition table (just the
MBR) with any of this (or at least I'm pretty certain that my hda1
(swap) and hda2 (ext3) are still fine, as I can still mount hda2 when I
boot from a rescue CD).
My question is, what is the safest way to proceed with repairing things
(I'd actually be happy to go back to lilo if that's safer, but I'm not
against splitting a small boot partition our of swap space and getting
grub to work properly). But I thought that in addition to trying to
investigate my options on my own, that since there're potential
downsides that I don't want to contemplate (lots of unbacked-up data on
hda2 that i'd prefer not to lose), it seemed worth asking some experts.
thanks so much in advance for your time,
~c
of course pointers to relevant docs are just as appreciated as
straightforward advice (if i'd read more before starting I obviously
wouldn't be in this quandry)
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