Cannot boot in CentOS

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handle123
Posts: 17
Joined: 2012/05/31 23:03:40

Cannot boot in CentOS

Post by handle123 » 2012/05/31 23:38:39

Hi,

Can someone help with this booting issue?

My PC has 2 hard drives, one IDE and one Sata, with several disk partitions on the Sata drive and with both Windows XP and CentOS residing on the same larger Sata drive. It could dual boot into either CentOS or Windows XP until recently.

I recently installed a newer version 5.5 of CentOS over the same old Linux partition. When booting up there is now a "grub>" prompt and nothing happens after this.

I typed boot and got:

Error 8: Kernel most be loaded before booting.

I tried both OS upgrade and fresh installation and ran into the same problem.

I boot into the Rescue mode using CD 1 of CentOS. Here is the output of fdisk -l, /boot/grub/device.map, /boot/grub/grub.conf, df -h. What changes are needed so that grub will display a boot menu instead of the grub prompt and will boot properly? Thank you.

fdisk -l
=========
Disk /dev/hdc: 40.0 GB .... (this is the small IDE Windows data drive)
...

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB ... (this is the larger Sata drive with the two OS)

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * .........................7 HPFS/NTFS find /grub/stage1

(hd0,6)

grub> root (hd0,6)

grub> kernel /vmlinuz-[version stuff here] [parameters here]

Possible files are:
vmlinuz-2.6.18-194.el5 vmlinuz-2.6.18-194.el5xen

grub > kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-194.el5

grub> initrd /initrd-[version stuff here].img

Possible files are:
initrd-2.6.18-194.el5.img initrd-2.6.18-194.el5xen.img

grug> initrd /initrd-2.6.18-194.el5.img

grub> boot
...
Setting clock (localtime): .... [OK]
Starting udev: chainloader (hd0,0)+1
grub> boot

pschaff
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Cannot boot in CentOS

Post by pschaff » 2012/06/01 02:07:23

Welcome to the CentOS fora. Please see the recommended reading for new users linked in my signature.

You should not install obsolete/buggy/unsupported versions. Try it with 5.8 or perhaps better 6.2 and report results if you have trouble with those. See also:
http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/ReinstallGRUB
http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/TroubleshootGRUB

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