Trouble replacing old Grub bootloader (FC17)

[kenwilly]

Last night, I tried installing Mageia on my Compaq laptop. I already had my hard drive setup as a dual-boot using grub (Win7 and Fedora Core 17). I formatted and installed Mageia and then through the install wizard setup Grub. I even changed the order of the grub entries. It said I was all set to go and to hit enter to reboot. I ejected the CD first before reboot.

When the reboot happened, the system ran the old version of grub and not the new one that I thought I had installed. The list had my three old Fedora Core kernals to boot from. Of course my Mageia install was not available through the grub menu. I am using a hybrid hard drive (Seagate Momentus) which does intelligent caching of files.

Did I miss something? Thanks for your help. Be back in a couple hours.

[gohlip]

If you still have your F17 (your old grub is still there?), boot into F17 and 'update-grub"; Mageia menu entry will be picked up.
And if you want Mageia's grub to be 'set to sda', boot into Mageia (after the above) and reset Mageia's boot to sda.
Note however Mageia's grub is grub legacy and F17 is grub2. Your choice.

If you do not have F17 anymore ('formatted'?), boot into Mageia live cd and go into grub prompt,
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
grub> root (hd0,x)
grub> setup (hd0,x)

[kenwilly]

Okay, it looks like the Live CD and the Installation CD are different, so I will download and burn that. Hopefully that will do the trick. It would be nice if the installation (setup) application handled this better. I'll let you know how it goes after I try all of your steps. Thanks for the advice!

[kenwilly]

Well, I booted the Live CD but there was no Grub to be found. Used the "find" command to try to locate it. Interesting, the "info" page was there but I guess not all of the applications are available.

Even tried using the FC17 disc to repair grub. Grub has got to be one of the most cryptic piles of donkey dung I've ever seen. After checking all of the config files, it still wasn't clear how to set the list of operating systems or even doing something as simple as changing the default O/S to boot.

Luckily, using the Windows 7 repair functionality was a whole lot simpler. Just type "bootrec /fixmbr" and then "bootrec /fixboot". I wish Mageia was this simple.

[gohlip]

Well, I booted the Live CD but there was no Grub to be found.

Go into terminal as root.

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 su -

Then

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 grub

Then

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grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
grub> root (hd0,x)
grub> setup (hd0,x)


If there is no output, it means installation is not complete, and best to reinstall.
In which case , suggest you format partitions.
ps: I'm not sure if you still want to keep F17 or if it is still bootable.

[gohlip]

Forgot to add, to quit grub prompt at terminal..

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 quit

[gohlip]

Oh while at grub prompt, can you copy output of

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grub> cat (hd0,x)/boot/grub/menu.lst

Just the first entry of mageia will do. This is in case there is further er, 'snags'.

ps: always note where (hd0,x) is written, this 'x' is a number derived from the output of "find /boot/grub/stage1"
ps: It's late here, I need my beauty sleep. Goodnite.