Date: August 9, 2011

Introduction

One of my systems is somewhat of an odd duck. It is a dual CPU Pentium II (hence it runs an i386 kernel) with a scsi controller, but also IDE ports.

This system was running Fedora 14 just fine, but after a yum upgrade to Fedora 15 refused to boot.

The fix

I installed a CDROM drive as primary master and booted the fedora 15 i686 live CD. I was able to look at /dev and use fdisk to find the two hard drives in the system: It turns out that the 80G drive on /dev/sda has nothing on it, just an empty filesystem.

My root partition is on /dev/sdb2. I have an ancient boot partition on /dev/sdb1, but it has ancient fedora 12 files on it and is of no real interest at this time.

I reinstall grub as follows: 

grub
find /boot/grub/stage1 -- it tells me (hd1,1), which is sdb2
find /grub/stage1      -- it tells me (hd1,0), which is sdb1
root (hd1,1)
setup (hd1)
quit
After this I reboot and everything is fine, so all is well that ends well.

Discussion

I have no clue why the fedora upgrade hosed this system, and will have to keep a close eye on it in the future. I am tempted to put a boot partition on the IDE drive, but probably won't. I am also tempted to actually use the boot partition on the SCSI drive, either that or delete its contents to prevent confusion. It seems clear that I don't actually need a boot partition with the current set of hard drives and this ancient BIOS - or else a nasty problem is lurking waiting to bite me.
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org