[CentOS] boot problems

[Phil Schaffner]

On Tue, 2008-10-28 at 12:31 +0300, fabian dacunha wrote:
> dear All.
> 
> Sorry for my earlier mail which i was not able to explain correctly
> 
> as i said b4

Correct English really would not take that much more effort as compared
to texting shortcuts, and would make it more likely that you might get
the help you are requesting.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#writewell

The entire article is worth a read.

> i had installed centos 5.2 to be as a squid proxy server and it was
> working fine for over a month or so but 3 days back the machine after a
> reboot jus refused to boot.
> 
> after the post it tries to boot and the screen jus display the below message
> 
> GNU Grub version 0.97
> [Minimal Bash like line editing is supported .....
> 
> guess grub cant find the OS file ..
> 
> how could i possible go about this
> 
> would really apprecite your help n suggestions

At the risk of sounding even MORE pedantic, many would appreciate it if
you ran a spell-checker as well.  (Grammar checkers seem to be beyond
the state-of-the-art in email clients.) :D

The GRUB shell is quiet powerful and can help in debugging your
problems.  If you do not have a /boot partition try:

        grub> find /boot/grub/stage1

If you do have a boot partition try 

        grub> find /grub/stage1

This should give you a clue as to what GRUB thinks the disk layout is.
This could have changed due to BIOS settings, hardware changes, or
hardware failures.

You might also try:

        grub> find /etc/fstab

This should be on the root partition /.

Grub command-line completion can help in re-constructing
missing/incorrect boot stanzas.

You can find out a lot more with "info grub" on a running system.

Do some more debugging and post what you have tried and your results
(per ESR's advice above) if unable to figure it out for yourself.

Good luck,
Phil