CentOS - Nov 2007 - Centos5 install failure

A couple weeks ago I attempted to install Centos5 to replace an 
increasingly decripit Fedora Core 1 installation. Centos went onto an 
80GB piece of previously unallocated space on /dev/hda, using the 
default configuration offered by anaconda. The installation process went 
smoothly, however, I was unable to boot Centos when it completed due to 
"Grub failure." IOW, I never even got the boot loader to come up.
I've
never been a big fan of grub (I've always used lilo) and this hasn't 
impressed me. I was able to restore Fedora's lilo loader but I cannot 
persuade lilo to boot Centos, probably because the / filesystem is using 
LVM which I am not familiar with. It failed with a kernel panic trying 
to find things in /dev.

I put it on the back shelf for a couple weeks and finally got back to it 
today. I wiped hda to give it a fresh base on which to install, and it 
installed fine once again -- no errors. But on reboot grub failed once 
again, getting as far as GRUB and then locking up, responding only to 
the RESET button. So I created a bootable grub CD and booted from that, 
fed it the Centos kernel and initrd and booted. 

Lots of "missing module" errors because (as it turns out) the Centos
installer neglected to create the proper module tree in /lib/modules.
But there was one for the xen kernel. WTF, I'll try that. Boot again and
tried to tell grub to load the xen kernel: "invalid file format."

Whatever. Booted the regular kernel and initrd again, gritting my teeth 
through all the errors and created a sym-link from the xen module tree
to what should be the regular module tree. Rebooted again with the
regular kernel and initrd. Fewer error messages this time, but still a
fair number. I just wanted to get to the point were I could repair the
missing modules.  

So the system comes up -- sort of. The modules that still couldn't load 
turned out to include those for my network card, so no network access. 
Nor could I mount any cds or the xfs file system on the raid array. 
Useless. Just frickin' useless. My low opinion of grub remains 
unchanged, and my opinion of Centos is following in the same
direction. I spent the rest of the afternoon restoring Fedora off my 
backup tapes.

Any clues what I did wrong?


-- 

John (john at os2.dhs.org)

> Any clues what I did wrong?
> 
Yes. You placed the kernel on an LVM (grub does not support LVM...at 
least not LVM2 IIRC) and then come to this list where grub and lilo 
users like me are subscribers. Don't complain about grub. grub gives you 
far more power than that piece of trash called lilo.

lilo will take on LVM but it is rather hard to tell it where the kernel 
image starts if you cannot boot up the Centos 5 kernel in the first place...

John Thompson wrote:
> A couple weeks ago I attempted to install Centos5 to replace an 
> increasingly decripit Fedora Core 1 installation. Centos went onto an 
> 80GB piece of previously unallocated space on /dev/hda, using the 
> default configuration offered by anaconda. The installation process went 
> smoothly, however, I was unable to boot Centos when it completed due to 
> "Grub failure." IOW, I never even got the boot loader to come up.
I've
> never been a big fan of grub (I've always used lilo) and this
hasn't
> impressed me. I was able to restore Fedora's lilo loader but I cannot 
> persuade lilo to boot Centos, probably because the / filesystem is using 
> LVM which I am not familiar with. It failed with a kernel panic trying 
> to find things in /dev.
>
> I put it on the back shelf for a couple weeks and finally got back to it 
> today. I wiped hda to give it a fresh base on which to install, and it 
> installed fine once again -- no errors. But on reboot grub failed once 
> again, getting as far as GRUB and then locking up, responding only to 
> the RESET button. So I created a bootable grub CD and booted from that, 
> fed it the Centos kernel and initrd and booted. 
>
> Lots of "missing module" errors because (as it turns out) the
Centos
> installer neglected to create the proper module tree in /lib/modules.
> But there was one for the xen kernel. WTF, I'll try that. Boot again
and
> tried to tell grub to load the xen kernel: "invalid file format."
>
> Whatever. Booted the regular kernel and initrd again, gritting my teeth 
> through all the errors and created a sym-link from the xen module tree
> to what should be the regular module tree. Rebooted again with the
> regular kernel and initrd. Fewer error messages this time, but still a
> fair number. I just wanted to get to the point were I could repair the
> missing modules.  
>
> So the system comes up -- sort of. The modules that still couldn't load
> turned out to include those for my network card, so no network access. 
> Nor could I mount any cds or the xfs file system on the raid array. 
> Useless. Just frickin' useless. My low opinion of grub remains 
> unchanged, and my opinion of Centos is following in the same
> direction. I spent the rest of the afternoon restoring Fedora off my 
> backup tapes.
>
> Any clues what I did wrong?
>
>
>   
Hi I would suggest if possible that you try installing again.  Once the 
installation is complete but before you reboot scp off all the files in 
/root so you have all the logs and etc that were made during the 
installation.

Then reboot, if you still find Grub doesn't work then boot from a CentOS 
boot cd / DVD and type linux rescue.  This will ask you for some basic 
information and then hopefully find you CentOS install

If this occurs then you should be able to chroot into your CentOS 
Installation and use grub-install to try installing grub manually.

Hope this helps, good luck  :)