On 3/24/11 2:59 AM, Simon Matter wrote: >> Thanks to the help of folks on this forum, I now have my Centos 4 >> box up and working, however I do have a question on how the >> repair actually worked. >> >> After starting the Linux Repair, the process "found my installed >> Linux". Some of you will remember that I had accidentally erased >> the /boot and /boot/grub directories, but I had most of the files >> saved (not the symbolic links) and put them back into the >> directories *and* I did run a rpm reinstall. >> >> When Linux Repair "found the installed Linux", did it create a >> new /boot and /boot/grub *or* did it just use what I had put there? > > When booting into "rescue" mode with the RH/CentOS installer disk, it > searches for filesystems that look like a Linux installation and mounts > them so you can fix them. The rescue system doesn NOT change anything - > that was you who did it by running grub-install or whatever. So, I think > nothing has changed in your /boot directory despite the things > grub-install may have touched. Yes, on CentOS4, I think you could have done the partition mounting by hand with the same results if you knew the layout. On CentOS5 there is a little extra magic to populate the /dev directory so things still work after you chroot into the place where you mounted the root of the hard drive. Grub-install just does some guesswork about the bios numbering that grub uses for devices/partitions, then runs grub with the right arguments to the root and setup commands. You could have done that yourself too. -- lesmikesell at gmail.com