Grub2

Grub2

Starting with Fedora 16, grub2 is used for new installs (upgrades still keep grub1).

Tasks / Common issues

Adding Other operating systems to the grub2 menu

If you have other operating systems setup and wish to boot them via grub2:

# yum install os-prober

# grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Note: As of the F16 Beta, os-prober should get pulled in automatically during install and used to auto-generate entries for your other installed operating systems.

Setting default entry

1. edit /boot/grub2/grub.cfg, and change the line

set default="0" 

to

set default="5"

Encountering the dreaded Grub2 boot prompt

You would swear that drive should boot and everything is ok, but then you see the Grub2 Command Prompt what to do and how to recover

1. List the drives which Grub2 saw

grub2> ls

2. The output for a dos partition table /dev/sda with three partitons will look something like

(hd0) (hd0,msdos3) (hd0,msdos2) (hd0,msdos1)

3. While the output for a gpt partition table /dev/sda with four partitions will look something like

(hd0) (hd0,gpt4) (hd0,gpt3)  (hd0,gpt2) (hd0,gpt1)

4. With this information you can now interrogate each partition of the drive and locate your vmlinuz and initramfs files

ls (hd0,1)/ 

Would list the files on /dev/sda1 and if it was the /boot would give you the full name of vmlnuz and initramfs

5. Armed with the location and full name of vmlinuz and initramfs you can "bootstrap" boot your system

5a. Declare your root partition first

grub> set root=(hd0,3)

5b. Declare the kernel you want used

grub> linux (hd0,1)/vmlinuz-3.0.0-1.fc16.i686 root=/dev/sda3 rhgb quiet selinux=0 
# NOTE : add other kernel args if you have need of them
# NOTE : change the numbers to match your system

5c. Declare the initrd to use

  
grub> initrd (hd0,1)/initramfs-3.0.0-1.fc16.i686.img
# NOTE : change the numbers to match your system

5d. Instruct Grub2 to now please boot the chosen files

grub> boot

6. Now when your system boots open a terminal

7. Issue the grub2-mkconfig command to re-create the grub.cfg file grub2 needed to boot your system

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

8. Issue the grub2-install command to install grub2 to your hard drive and make use of your config

grub2-install --boot-directory=/boot /dev/sda
# Note: your drive may have another device name check for it with mount command output

Other issues

Other grub2 issues: it refuses to install on partition's boot sector (maybe can be forced?) and, !!! this is important !!!, it fails to install if for whatever reason your floppy controller is activated in BIOS and there's no drive connected or floppy disk inserted. The workaround is to run (post OS install) from rescue mode:

grub2-install <target device> --no-floppy

Further Reading

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Grub2

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Features/Grub2Migration