How to reinstall the /boot folder?

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Hello,

After updating packages on RHEL 6.2 and attempting to reboot, I discovered that the /boot folder has disappeared. How do I reinstall the /boot folder. along with the associated files and subdiresctories, from the RHEL Installation disk?

rd
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Responses

ir. Jan Gerrit Kootstra's picture Guru 6222 points
7 February 2013 6:40 AM

Richard,

 

Question 1: Has it disappeared or does not it mount automatically anymore?

try this:

fdisk -l

find the partition name (f.e /dev/sda1)

mount /dev/sda1 /boot

see what error message you get, if none edit /etc/fstab

In the past it happened to me that LABEL did not work anymore after some patching.

 

Kind regards,

 

ir. Jan Gerrit Kootstra

Jamie Bainbridge's picture Red Hat Guru 7257 points
7 February 2013 7:12 AM

You can do this from Rescue Mode. If you need to manually rebuild the chroot, here's a quick cheatsheet I keep handy:

mkdir -p /mnt/sysimage/

fdisk -l
# observe /boot partition, assumed /dev/sda1 here

lvm pvscan
lvm vgscan
lvm lvscan
# observe root partition, assumed /dev/mapper/vg-lv here

mount /dev/mapper/vg-lv /mnt/sysimage/
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sysimage/boot/

mount /proc /mnt/sysimage/proc/ -o bind -t proc
mount /dev /mnt/sysimage/dev/ -o bind
mount /sys /mnt/sysimage/sys/ -o bind -t sysfs

chroot /mnt/sysimage/

Mount the CD and reinstall the filesystem, kernel, grub and redhat-logos packages from the /Packages directory with something like rpm -ivh --force /mnt/cd/Packages/<package-filename>.rpm

Copy the GRUB config file back with cp /etc/grub.conf /boot/grub/grub.conf and link it to menu.lst with cd /boot/grub; ln -s ./grub.conf menu.lst

Perform a GRUB installation with grub then find /grub/stage1 and root (hdX,Y) and setup (hdX)

I managed to recover a virtual machine this way, simulating your error with rm -rf /boot/*

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