Interesting recovery frustrations

[Rashkae]

On 10-12-15 03:07 PM, MR ZenWiz wrote:
> For reasons I shan't go into here, I saved my Maverick /boot and /
> into spare partitions I have set aside for just this sort of thing and
> installed RHEL 5.4 on my workstation.  I battled with it for about a
> day and decided to go back to Maverick this morning.
>
> I figured it would be a fairly simple task - restore the /home user
> I'd previously saved (no problem there), then boot from the live CD
> and restore the boot and root partitions, then grub-install and sail
> away.
>
> Not.
>
> The first time after the grub-install the system refused to boot at
> all - it came up in grub with no information and minimal facilities,
> which I pretty much expected, but not being a grub whiz, I went back
> to the live CD and munged around again.  This time I did a grub-setup
> and specified the (correct) boot partition to use, and that seemed to
> work better - it came up, boot grub, waited for me to select the right
> version and then - failed again.  Something about not being able to
> find the right /.
>
> Again, not being a mighty grub whiz, I dropped into repair mode,
> copied the grub.cfg out of the /boot/grub directory, edited it to use
> LABEL=/ instead of the (presumably incorrect) UUID, wrote it back to
> the right place and rebooted again.  Yes, I know that isn't the
> "right" way to do things, but it works and it beats trying to plow
> through the documentation for grub and figure out which file needs
> what tweaks when the answer is fairly simple (for me, anyway).
>
> This time it complained that / was not ready and offered me the option
> to skip the disk check or go in and modify things manually.
>
> I kind of fumbled around for a while, trying to "recover" /, not
> entirely sure what to do, eventually gave up on that and rebooted.
> Same things, except this time I told it to skip the disk check, and
> voila - everything is copacetic.
>    
And a day later, i figured out what your problem was, which was never Grub.

When you used your exiting partitions to install RHEL, those partitions 
were re-formatted with a new UUID (As I'm sure you realized).. you 
corrected this in Grub, but you seem to have completely neglected to 
update your /etc/fstab file, which is why the disk check failed, (and 
other partitions might be failing to mount.)  Use sudo blkid to get a 
listing of all current UUID's on your system, and make certain that all 
filesystems in /etc/fstab have the correct UUID.