[gentoo-user] Boot situation

[Colleen Beamer]

Hi all,

Please read this carefully.  Don't take offense, I'm not insinuating
that you wouldn't.  It's just that I don't want to get myself into more
of a pickle than I'm in!  ;-(

This morning as I was getting my son off to work, he got me upset about
something and I walked over to my laptop and instead of hitting the 'On'
button, I accidentally hit the 'Media Direct' button.  (I'm explaining
the why so you won't thing that I'm a total airhead!).  The laptop is a
Dell XPS M1710.  The Dell Media Direct Splash screen display, but of
course, did nothing else 'cause there is only Linux on the laptop.


Anyway, this corrupted my boot partition, but I was able to fix that.  I
just deleted the partition that hitting the 'Media Direct' button made.
 It put this at the end of the hard drive, but it was made the bootable
partition and had a DOS/Windows partition type.

I deleted the partition that hitting the 'Media Direct' button had made,
then recreated a new Linux partition with an ext2 file system and made
this bootable where the original boot partition had been.

Then, I followed the Gentoo Handbook, doing all the relevant steps
except for downloading software that was already there.  I chroot'd into
 my environment to install grub - I did all the relevant steps including
chrooting into my own environment.  In my chroot'd environment, I can do
an 'ls' and it reads the drives.  I can also edit files like grub.conf
and fstab, so there isn't a problem with my remaining partitions after
reconfiguring the boot partition.

I reinstalled grub, created grub.conf and ran grub-install and that was
successful.

However, when I reboot, I get a garbled screen, but I *can* make out the
text, although barely.

It goes through the boot process and gets to the point where 'Activating
mdev' is displayed

Then, the following is displayed:
Determining root device
Block dev sda3 is not a valid root device
The root block device is unspecified or not detected.

Of note and I'm not sure if this is where the problem is, is that when I
was mounting my partitions prior to chroot'ing into my own environment,
I got a message about maximal mount count and it told me I should run
e2fsck.  I tried this and got an error message.  However, my hard drive
is not ext2, it is ext3.

I apologize for the length of this, but I wanted to try to explain
everything.  I'm having fits here - I'm writing from my old 686 computer
which did have all my files on it.  However, I ftp'd them to my webspace
and then back down to the laptop.  When I did that, I deleted most of
them off the 686 and as luck would have it I didn't do a recent backup
from the laptop.  I do have an older backup, but would lose some recent
files if I can't get my laptop up and running without a reinstall.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Regards,

Colleen
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