[ILUG] GRUBiness

[Dermot Daly]

I've a GRUB problem that has me tearing my hair out.  Perhaps someone
can shed a light on it?

My home PC is set up as follows:
/dev/hda - NTFS running Win XP Professional (Hey - I still need access
to Ulster Bank).  This has the MBR which can subsequently boot Fedora
Core 2
..which is on /dev/hdb, set up as follows:
/dev/hdb1 is the / partition
/dev/hdb2 is the /boot partition

Now..Before I go further, please not that this has been working for fine
since I had RH 7.3 on it (and subsequently FC1, and now FC2). I.E. For
over a year.

Last week, when I choose to boot FC2 from the MBR, all I got was the
word "GRUB" in the top left corner.  This allows for 20 or so keypresses
before the annoying beep.  Ctrl-Alt-Delete will work at this point for a
reboot. (Incidentally, it used to be standard FC2 splash screen, with a
menu of a number of different Kernels, including the facility to boot
back to Windows).

I've now idea as to why this has stopped working, and I have tried a
number of things based on googling, but all to no avail.  Here's what
I've tried so far:
1. Boot with the rescue mode from the FC2 cd.  Note that this boots and
mounts my system correctly, so it appears that everything on the disk is
ok.
2. From here, after chrooting to /mnt/sysimage I've tried fresh
grub-installs (all to no avail).
3. I've downloaded and built the latest version of GRUB (FC2 comes with
0.94, and I have used 0.95) again to no avail.
4. I created a boot floppy and this works fine. ("Press any key to boot
from /dev/hdb2" stuff)
5. I've fsck'ed my disk.

In all of my various attempts to fix this I have screwed around with my
grub.conf and indeed attempted to install on /dev/hdb, /dev/hdb1 and
/dev/hdb2 (which I'm sure is wrong), but the symptoms have remained the
same.

I've run rootkithunter to ensure that this wasn't some script kiddie who
had got in and screwed something up.

Unfortunately this is a machine at home, so I can't post my grub.conf,
and I guess this is the most likely candidate but has anyone any ideas
on how I can fix this?  Booting from a floppy is a right pain.

Cheers,
Dermot.