CentOS - Nov 2008 - Reinstalled Windows and GRUB - Cannot boot Linux - SOLVED

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 4:32 PM, MHR <mhullrich at gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 12:58 PM, Lanny Marcus <lmmailinglists at
gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
>> Question: Is /hda3 mounted properly? I don't think so, because when
I
>> try to boot Linux from the Grub menu on the HD, it gives me "Error
17:
>> Cannot mount selected partition"
> Someone just answered earlier in this thread that you need to change
> your hd(0,2) to hd(0,1) on the grub boot line.  That should work.  You
> don't need to do this from any special rescue boot, just boot the
> system, and when the grub stage 2 boot selection shows with its
> countdown, stop it (with the space bar) and use the grub shell to edit
> that line and it _should_ boot properly.
Mark (MHR) and the earlier responder who previously mentioned to
change  to "root (hd0,1)" in the GRUB boot menu. A_SPECIAL_THANK_YOU!
That got me into CentOS5.2....  :-)  I did notice an error message,
when the box was booting, "mounting local filesystems failed" but I
think that has to do with mounting the NTFS partition, which I will
fix in /etc/fstab after I send this message.
> If WCTW, instead of downloading the CentOS 5 DVD, just pull down the
> first CD image and burn that.  It's a lot shorter than the whole DVD,
> and it's all you need to get into rescue mode.
OK. I will download the first CD, but not tonight, since my CentOS 5
Installation DVD is now toast. I ran into this problem, Saturday
afternoon, and the list is very slow on weekends and then our ADSL
went down, because there was a bad card in the phone company Router or
some other HW in our subdivision.  To everyone who replied, THANK YOU!
 Lanny

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 4:32 PM, MHR <mhullrich at gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 12:58 PM, Lanny Marcus <lmmailinglists at
gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
>> Question: Is /hda3 mounted properly? I don't think so, because when
I
>> try to boot Linux from the Grub menu on the HD, it gives me "Error
17:
>> Cannot mount selected partition"
>
> When I had this error, it meant that grub could not find the boot
> partition itself.  (The boot PROM did, but grub doesn't see the disks
> the same way and can get lost.)
>
> Someone just answered earlier in this thread that you need to change
> your hd(0,2) to hd(0,1) on the grub boot line.  That should work.  You
> don't need to do this from any special rescue boot, just boot the
> system, and when the grub stage 2 boot selection shows with its
> countdown, stop it (with the space bar) and use the grub shell to edit
> that line and it _should_ boot properly.
>
> If WCTW, instead of downloading the CentOS 5 DVD, just pull down the
> first CD image and burn that.  It's a lot shorter than the whole DVD,
> and it's all you need to get into rescue mode.
All is well now!   :-) I corrected the line in /etc/fstab and I can
see the NTFS partition. As I expected, changing the line in the GRUB
boot menu, as the box was booting, did not survive a reboot. I edited
the lines for the 3 Linux Kernels, in /boot/grub/grub.conf and that
fixed that problem.... I knew I had to edit those files, and what  MHR
(Mark) explained to me tonight, and apparently a poster prior to him,
made it *much* easier. I would like to learn how to do things with the
Live CD, but as it turns out, I did not need that for this problem and
it just added to my frustration. Thanks again, to everyone!

glad to know the problem was solved. it was my first post on the ML that 
actually helped someone !