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Contents 1 Introduction 2 What to do? 2.1 GRUB Installed On Separate Partition 2.2 GRUB Installed on Gentoo Partition 2.3 Success

[edit] Introduction

Fixing kernel when grub gives you a shell

This is mainly a newbie HOWTO (I'm a bit of a newb myself).

Ok, so you just installed Gentoo, you booted, and instead of the Grub menu you expected, you get this thing that says something that says minimal shell. You should see something like this:

    GNU GRUB  version 0.96  (640K lower / 3072K upper memory)

 [ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported.  For the first word, TAB
   lists possible command completions.  Anywhere else TAB lists the possible
   completions of a device/filename. ]

grub>

[edit] What to do?

[edit] GRUB Installed On Separate Partition

If you have installed grub on a separate partition /dev/hda3 and have kernel in / directory, type in the GRUB shell:

root (hd0,2)
setup (hd0)
quit

[edit] GRUB Installed on Gentoo Partition

If you have kernel and GRUB on main Gentoo partition (Ex. /dev/hda4) in /boot directory, type:

root (hd0,3)/boot
setup (hd0)
quit

(hd0) means first hard drive and (hd0,2) is a third partition on first hard drive (same as /dev/hda3) where GRUB files will be installed.

[edit] Success

If you see something like this:

grub> root (hd0,2)
 Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83

grub> setup (hd0)
 Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... no
 Checking if "/grub/stage1" exists... yes
 Checking if "/grub/stage2" exists... yes
 Checking if "/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes
 Running "embed /grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)"...  16 sectors are embedded.
succeeded
 Running "install /grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+16 p (hd0,2)/grub/stage2 /grub/menu
.lst"... succeeded
Done.

reboot your system and menu shold be back.