nixCraft

Something mysterious happened on my remote dedicated server today that screwed up the boot process so that it was getting an error 2 during the GRUB bootstrap.

Once this error occurred, the boot process froze and there was no way to get control back or login either because the boot process never completed.

Not knowing what was wrong (I wasn't seeing this message because it was happening during boot-up) I contacted my server host and requested server KVM/IP access. Once I had enough access to SEE the error, I contacted them again explaining I could do nothing to fix the problem if I could not get keyboard access.

So somebody there modified the GRUB start-up files enough to cause it to stop and ask me which of two bootstraps I want to run. That gave me the entry point I needed to grab control, check what was happening and decide how to fix it.

I at least have the system booting again. I'm still getting errors later in the boot process but at least it's booting and not locking up like it was before.

The problem NOW is I can't figure out how to tell GRUB to SAVE my changes to its startup process so I won't have to re-enter them every time I reboot the server. At the moment, I must be present and choose the boot up process I want to modify within 10 seconds or I have to restart the system all over again with CTRL-ALT-DEL from the KVM console and try again. Then I make my changes and the reboot proceeds and completes ( with the forementioned errors ) but the next time I restart the server, I'm right back in the same situation again.

Does anyone here who know enough about using GRUB in console mode to tell me how to force it to SAVE my changes? So I don't have to make the same changes every time I reboot the server?

Thanks!

The solution to this problem turned out to be: make the tested change in the menu.lst file in /boot/grub. Saving it there made it permanent.

Hope this helps someone else later.

Red Hat / CentOS / Fedora Linux => /etc/grub.conf (/boot/grub/grub.conf)

Debian / Ubuntu Linux => /boot/grub/menu.lst

__________________
Vivek Gite
Linux Evangelist
Be proud RHEL user, and let the world know about your enterprise choices! Join RedHat user group.
Always use CODE tags for posting system output and commands!
Do you run a Linux? Let's face it, you need help