Suppose your multi-boot box has a horked GRUB bootloader because of this. No problem, as long as you have a bootable rescue disk or USB stick. Most any Linux LiveCD should work: a Knoppix CD, SystemRescueCD, and your installation disks may have a rescue function. Use it to restore the GRUB bootfiles to a partition that you know GRUB can boot. Boot up your rescue medium and run these commands:

# grub
Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.
[various ignorable messages]
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
(hd0,1)
grub> root (hd0,1)

Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
grub> setup (hd0)
Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists...yes
Checking if "/boot/grub/stage2" exists...yes
Checking if "/boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists...yes
Running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)"... 15 sectors are embedded.
succeeded
Running "install /boot/grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+15 p (hd0,1)/boot/grub/stage2
/boot/grub/menu.lst"...succeeded
Done.
grub> quit

Reboot, and your familiar GRUB menu will greet you.

Resources

• Fedora features- ext4 filesystem
• grub: does not support 256 byte inodes on ext3
• current e2fsprogs incompatible with grub
• Ext4: The Next Generation of Ext2/3 Filesystem

Carla Schroder is the author of the Linux Cookbook and the newly-released Linux Networking Cookbook, and is a regular contributor to LinuxPlanet.

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