actually its dosnt even make it to Grub, its the EMI menu on Intel servers... so I guess it cannot even find a proper boot device.. ill have to do more research on the issue. if you have any ideas why that would also be great help.

thanks alot,

Quoting Aleksandar Milivojevic alex@milivojevic.org:

Quoting Nathan lists@netdigix.com:

...

no its the prompt centos goes to when it cannot find anything to boot to.

So it's the grub prompt most likely. If it is, then your boot partition is either too large and part of it falls outside of BIOS addressable disk space (first 1024 cylinders), or is not positioned inside BIOS addressable disk space (basically, same thing). Grub can access disk drives only using BIOS calls. It needs to be able to access files in /boot/grub directory, as well as kernel and initrd images in /boot directory. All those files *must* be in BIOS addressable range, or booting will fail. Fdisk will issue a warning describing this for disks with more than 1024 cylinders. Unfortunately, you won't get such warning during graphical install. Grub isn't really verbose about this either (it just drops to CLI, without telling user where the problem is).

You can easily check if what I just described is the problem you are having. Boot from CD into rescue mode. Invoke fdisk and print out partition table. The start and end cylinder of partition that holds /boot directory must be bellow 1024. If they are not, you are in trouble.

If this is the problem you are having, the easiest way is to reinstall with above limitations in mind. Common way of dealing with this BIOS limitation is to create separate partition for /boot, and to make sure entire partition used for /boot is inside first 1024 cylinders. For example, by making /boot be first partition on the disk, and having it relatively small (100MB is more than enough for this partition). This is limitation of the BIOS, nothing to do with CentOS (any other operating system).

---

This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.

---

CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

Thanks

- Nathan - http://www.netdigix.com