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CentOS 4.x machine not rebooting and faced with a grub prompt

Autor fabian.arrotin

One of my customer phoned me to say that one CentOS 4.x machine (acting as a apache reverse proxy) didn’t reboot after a power outage. The machine had two sata disks configured in raid 1 (through md/software raid) but instead of booting, the machine was just displaying a grub> prompt.

Of course i tried the traditional `grub-install –recheck /dev/sda` and `grub-install –recheck /dev/sdb` and also the manual procedure (already described here) to install grub on both devices .. but no luck .. still booting at the grub> prompt.

But then i looked (in rescue mode) at the (/mnt/sysimage)/etc/grub.conf and i counted 22 kernel entries in the file .. The customer had configured the nightly automatic yum update but he never cleaned the old kernels (both up and smp) … so i “cleaned up” the grub.conf file, once again installed grub with grub-install and …. machine rebooted normally ..

I’ve never thought that too many entries in the grub.conf file could block the machine from booting … Maybe that will save other people time