H.S. wrote:
Hello, This is not debian specific, but I foresee that I might need to do this in my Debian Etch one of these days. I use a common /boot for dual booting between Debian Etch and FC4. Recently I re-installed Debian Etch and overwrote everything in /boot. If I want to boot into FC4 now, how do I go about reconstructing the files in /boot for that distribution? This is not the same as recovering lost grub, is it? In this case, I have lost vmlinux* files that were the FC4 kernels. It is not utterly important to reconstruct files in /boot FC4, but I am taking this as an exercise so that I get some experience in this problem. This would be usefule even if I lost files for my Debian Etch I guess. thanks, ->HS
Thanks to Yannick and Roberto for their helpful replies. Here is what I did:I booted with a FC4 CD into 'rescue' mode by typing 'linux rescue' as boot parameters.
The boot process then asked for language and keyboard type (both were chosen to be US) and then the boot proceeded and gave a message that in the rescue whatever installation is found will be mounted under /mnt/sysimage. Choosing 'continue' gave the next message to choose the root partition (i.e. "/") from the listed partitions. I have three OSes installed so there were a few partitions listed. I knew which partition was for the FC installation and chose that. The next screen prompt reported that there were errors while loading the system under /mnt/sysimage and whatever could be had been mounted.
I then had to manually mount the various partitions I had in FC installation (/boot, /var, /tmp, /home, swap) and then did:
#> chroot /mnt/sysimageI was then able to give all the commands as root as if I was in my FC installation. I installed a new kernel with Yum and was then able to boot into FC by putting the new kernel's config lines in /boot (I have common /boot for FC and Debian Etch).
Thank again, ->HS