Fedora 10 cannot enter interactive boot

[burnie]

Trying to achieve a decent dual-monitor display setup, I created a dual-head xorg.conf file using aticonfig and now F10 won't boot. Screen flickers with a message complaining about a missing file (as far as I can tell).

I am unable to enter the interactive boot process using 'i' -- escaping the boot sequence with 'e' and adding "init=/bin/sh" to the kernel command allows me to view the file structure, but it is r/o and I cannot rename or change the (apparently troublesome) xorg.conf file.

Oddly, $ ls /boot in that situation indicates the /boot directory is empty. But the boot menu properly lists three Fedora 10 kernels plus VISTA so it seems that the file /boot/grub/grub.conf must be there.

I'm kind of desperate here - can anybody help?

[Lazydog]

You could use the install CD/DVD and boot into rescue mode which will make it possible to mount the file system and then repair/fix your config files.

[burnie]

I have a Live CD - it doesn't display a rescue mode option. Can I edit the boot line to fix that?

[devils casper]

Type 3 or 1 at the end of kernel line instead of init=/bin/sh.
Or boot up from LiveCD and mount /boot and / partitions.

In case nothing works, post the output of fdisk -l command here.

su -
fdisk -l

[burnie]

adding 1 didn't work - so I went back to the live disk.

fdisk -l tells me (basically that) /dev/sda is my hard drive, that sda1 is a Windows boot partition, sda2 is a Windows recovery partition, sda3 is my boot partition, sda4 is the name of the extended partition, and sda5 is my filesystem (Linux LVM).
I created mount points /root/boot and /root/locals

mount -t ext3 /dev/sda3 boot works fine.
mount -t ext3 /dev/sda5 locals tells me /dev/sda5 is already mounted or locals is busy.
umount locals does not change this.

mount | grep sda produces one line:
/dev/sda3 on /root/boot type ext3 (rw)

No mention of sda5

[devils casper]

Its not possible mount LVM using mount command.
Could you post the complete output of fdisk -l command?
Have you checked contents of /boot partition?

[burnie]

Contents of boot partition is nominal -- three versions of vmlinuz, and the grub and efi subdirectories. That partition is small, as you can see.

# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xc10d123c

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 14260 114539484 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 29049 30401 10865664 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 14261 14285 200812+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 14286 29048 118583797+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 14286 29048 118583766 8e Linux LVM

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Disk /dev/sdb: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x5167a4ac

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 30401 244196001 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdd: 163.9 GB, 163927556096 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19929 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xd2c5e48a

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdd1 1 4999 40154436 83 Linux
/dev/sdd2 5000 9999 40162500 83 Linux
/dev/sdd3 10000 14999 40162500 83 Linux
/dev/sdd4 15000 19929 39600225 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sde: 64 MB, 64487424 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x87bdc3e0

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sde1 1 8 62937 b W95 FAT32
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(1023, 254, 63) logical=(7, 213, 63)

[burnie]

Thanks, Casper, for your guidance. I finally found how to mount the LVM on a page named

Mounting_a_Linux_LVM_volume.html

which was on a site named brandonhutchinson.com (sorry I can't post the URL).

Key command (in my case) was

mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /media/myfs

--- YMMV