HowTo use Grub rescue mode

Sometimes when you upgrade or migrate your linux from one disk to another, boot should hang out on line  "grub rescue>",

what now ?



List available disks

grub rescue>ls

Here you can see something like (hd0,msdos1) (hd0,msdos2). Your physical disk is hd0 and partitions are msdos*.
Now you must find which is root partition.

grub rescue>ls (hd0,msdos1)/
bin   cdrom  etc   initrd.img      lib    lib64       media  opt   root  sbin     srv  tmp  var      vmlinuz.old
boot  dev    home  initrd.img.old  lib32  lost+found  mnt    proc  run   selinux  sys  usr  vmlinuz

Good this is our root partition. Now we must set prefix for grub to be able load modules and set root to be able load kernel.

grub rescue>set prefix=(hd0,msdos1)/boot/grub
grub rescue>insmod linux
grub rescue>set root=(hd0,msdos1)

Our kernel is located in /vmlinuz and initrd file is /initrd.img (look on ls section)
We load kernel and initrd image and boot system.

grub rescue>linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1 ro
grub rescue>inird /initrd.img
grub rescue>boot

Done ! Some lines can be different, it depends on your configuration.

If you are using LVM, or Linux MD RAID you must load additional modules to work with this technologies.

I recomend study your /boot/grub/grub.cfg to learn what your system needs.