[TriLUG] grub ate my friends hard drive

[John F Davis]

Hello

A moment ago a friend asked me to help them load their newly built kernel.
They said grub wouldn't show their new kernel and instead just booted their
old kernel.  So I edited the /etc/boot/grub/grub.conf file and noticed that
they had two entries and a line which said default=0;  Being the astute guy
that I am, I changed default=0 to default=1 (his new kernel was listed as
the second stanza) and did a reboot command.  When the linux box rebooted,
it simply said GRUB in the lefthand corner and locked up.  No fancy Redhat
image. No kernel booting, nothing.

So, we booted from CDROM with a 7.2 install cd.  At the prompt, we said
linux rescue and followed the prompts until we got a shell.  I went to the
/mnt/sysimage/boot/grub/grub.conf file and changed the default back to 0.
I was very saddened to see that when we rebooted once again, we have the
same error.  ie. no boot messages, just the word GRUB in the left hand
corner of a black and white character based screen.

What's the deal?

JD