[CentOS] boot failure after install

[alex at milivojevic.org]

Quoting Peter Farrow <peter at farrows.org>:

> The install goes through ok, but when the system comes to reboot, it 
> seems the boot loader fails.  I've seen fail on the first reboot or 
> after a random number of reboots, across different hardware as wide 
> and varied as you can get, the common factor is software raid, 
> (mirrored drives).
>
> It either fails just displaying "GRUB" or fails with a flashing 
> cursor at the bootup time.
>
> Booting a rescue cd, doing a chroot /mnt/sysimage and then the 
> following grub commands fixes the issue permanently, so that it never 
> fails again,
>
> grub
>
> grub-> root (hd0,0)
> grub-> setup (hd0)
> grup-> root (hd1,0)
> grub-> setup (hd1)
> grub-> quit
>
> it seems to me the Anaconda installer doesn't do something quite 
> right which leads to this random style failure.  Its only random as 
> to when it will do it, unless you do this, it will do it at some 
> point.....

Yup, happened to me.  With a twist.  It seems in my case it is not repairable.

I have 4 machines at home (3 desktops, one laptop).  Desktops were 
fine, laptop
shows the symptoms you described.  The only thing, the root/setup as described
above (or alternative grub-install) does not fix the problem.  The laptop is
rather standard install, three physical partitions (WinXP, /boot, LVM).  WinXP
and /boot under 8GB (max addressable by the laptop's BIOS).  I can manually
type root, kernel and initrd commands on the Grub prompt (the way they appear
in grub.conf file), and the system will boot just fine.  Even the file name
completition works when I hit tab key.  So Grub can definitely access 
the /boot
partition.  But for whatever reason it fails to read grub.conf and/or display
menu screen.  It's kind of annoying having to manually type several commands
each time I want to use the laptop, but I got used to it.

One more detail.  I had Fedora Core 3 installed on the laptop prior to 
CentOS 4.
Same disk configuration, same partition sizes.  And Grub worked out of the box
as it should.

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