Sometimes bad things can happen to your boot (Web hosting control panel)
Sometimes bad things can happen to your boot loader. One common symp- tom of boot loader problems is a message saying that the operating systemcould not be found. Another hint that the problem is your boot loader is if younever see your boot menu,which is a screen that comes up during the bootprocess that lets you choose what operating system and version to boot. The boot menu will look different from distribution to distribution. If you suspect a boot loader problem, see the section Entering RescueMode, later in this chapter. For another option, see the sidebar CustomBoot Disks. Step 3: The boot loader (GRUB or LILO) loads the system kernel into memoryEvery computer (and electronic device) requires an operating system to run. The technical term for this operating system, or at least the core of it, is thekernel.If the kernel is your maestro, orchestrating all the components of yourcomputer and delegating resources in a logical and cooperative manner, theboot loader is the red carpet on which the maestro arrives. Many Linux distributions today actually put up a GUI progress screen duringthe kernel loading and system initializationphase (after the kernel finishesloading, when it finishes up the boot process). If you want to see what hap- pens, you can typically click an icon or press a key. Just look for instructionson how to see details. 98Part I:Getting Your Feet Wet Custom boot disksYou can protect against boot loader failures afteryou get your installation working by making acustom boot floppy disk, which you can use toboot the system if the boot loader on your harddrive gets corrupted. Many distributions havespecial programs or tools available to makecustom boot disks for you, and some will offer tomake the disks during installation. The programsto make a disk manually are mkbootdisk forFedora Core and Mandrake, drakfloppy forMandrake as well, yast for SuSE, and build-boot- floppy for Xandros. However, a custom boot diskwon t help you if something goes wrong with thelater boot steps. It s only good for boot loaderproblems. After you manage to boot with thefloppy, open a terminal window (see Chapter 14), type su -to become the root (administrative) user, and then double-check which boot loaderyour distribution uses. For LILO, type lilo -vto try to repair your boot loader on your harddrive. For GRUB, look in the file /boot/grub/ menu.lstand look for a line in the beginningwith the text boot= for example, it may sayboot=/dev/hde. Then, type grub-installbootdrive, where bootdrive is the hard drivelisted in the boot line, such as grub-install/dev/hde. Now you can try rebooting withoutthe floppy in the floppy drive.
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