Gentoo

If I use dd or cp, will they only copy the contents?

The contents of the misbehaving partition seem to be perfectly intact. I can boot SuSE live from a DVD and mount the partition. The problem is that grub won't recognize it as a boot partition.

Is there a way I can only change the attributes of the partition? will dd or cp change the partition attributes?

Thanks,
Siegfried

Hmm. cp or dd on a partition won't set a partition bootable, no, that's defined in the partition table, i.e. sector zero. Something like this will set Partition 1 bootable:

Code:

# fdisk /dev/hda

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 36483.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): a
Partition number (1-4): 1

Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered!

Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.

#

But are you certain that the partition you see is the boot partition? On some systems, like mine, /boot is a partition on it's own, not the root partition.

Is it true that grub.conf lives in an ext2 or ext3 and not in a windows partition?

Assume that is true: grub works but cannot find grub.conf because it cannot mount that partition. Therefor, the boot partition must be good and the fedora partition is a seperate partition that is not bootable.

Siegfried

Apparently partition magic changed the fedora partition from #5 to #4. When I type in the commands

root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4smp ro root=LABEL=/1 rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4smp.img

Everything boots fine! Hurray.

Now, why cannot grub automatically find /boot/grub/grub.conf?

When I manually issue the grub command "find /boot/grub.conf" it finds it on (hd0,4).

How can I make grub automatically find /boot/grub/grub.conf?

Thanks,
Siegfried

Grub lives in none of the above. Grub lives in the MBR itself, Sector Zero. It loads stuff like grub.conf from another partition, but the MBR is the prime mover. Grub doesn't mount partitions since it happens outside of any OS. It can grab individual files but not much beyond that. Or it may be looking for files in a slightly different place than you expect. What does your partition structure look like? Is boot a partition by itself? Does it have a symlink like

Code:

# ls -l /boot/boot
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root       1 Apr 12  2005 boot -> .
#

I know mine does, and when I decided it was useless and deleted it, my system stopped booting

And if that doesn't work, maybye try running grub-install again. It'll probe BIOS devices and figure out which BIOS device goes with which Linux device and hopefully configure the bootstrap code from there.