Bitten By Grub, and Rescued by Super Grub

We are writing documents in DocBook format for our upcoming open source project and I needed to use Open Office 2.4 to convert some our old MS Word documents into DocBook format. Yes, now you can use Open Office Writer to save your documents in DocBook format. I was using Fedora 8 and it came with 2.3 version and it did not had easy upgrade option for 2.4 and Fedora 9 supported it. I had been putting off the Fedora 9 upgrade for a while, so, I thought this is good time as any other and popped in the Fedora 9 CD and hit upgrade and every thing went just fine.

...until I removed the CD and rebooted the machine. To my horror the the screen stopped with words

GRUB.

and would not progress any further, and my mind started racing and my hands started to tremble (after all I am a newbie at this Fedora stuff). Then I switched to another spare machine and started googling for the solution, and I came across some thread which mentioned use of Super Grub rescue disk to fix the issues with Grub, with no options at hand I was ready to give Super Grub a try.

So, I popped in the CD for Super Grub and booted the machine again. This time it booted to a menu I can't describe, the options can be be chosen by your tolerance for amount of risk you are willing to take. By now I am literally cursing.

Super Grub Disk (WITH HELP)                :-)))                    
Super Grub Disk (NO HELP)                    :-|                   
GRUB => MBR & !LINUX! (1)         AUTO     ;-)))
GRUB => MBR & !LINUX! (>2)      MANUAL      |8-)                  
!LINUX! (1)         AUTO    
!LINUX! (>2)      MANUAL
!WIN!                                       :(((
WIN => MBR & !WIN!            :(((((((((((((((((
EASY LIVE SWAP

By now couple of my colleagues who were watching me suffer (and laughing) looked at the menu and suggested I take the option with smiley face, feeling lost I hit 1, and followed directions in couple other screens and Super Grub finished it job. I rebooted again.

This time I saw the Fedora 9 booting screens and rest is history. Though I was skeptical about Super Grub based on its UI, it did it's job exactly right. So THANK YOU Super Grub team.