Dear Friends,

I had a laptop installed with Centos6.3, Windows 7. Eventually this laptop had some graphic card issues and became unusable. However, the HDD containing the said OSes is intact.

A few months later while trying use this HDD on another laptop, I had trouble booting due to, corrupted grub, which used to say "kernel must be loaded first".

Later trying to recover the grub using live CDs, lead nowhere and I realised that the initramfs and vmlinuz files are not found to be anywhere in /boot or / and totally missing.

Tried booting from a Centos 6.3 installation DVD, in rescue mode and able to mount the drive and chroot to the Centos 6.3 installation.

But running dracut in order to rebuild initramfs...

"mount --bind /proc /mnt/sysimage/proc
mount --bind /dev /mnt/sysimage/dev
mount --bind /sys /mnt/sysimage/sys

chroot /mnt/sysimage

dracut -f"

produces the following error:

find: lib/modules/2.6.32-279.el6.i686': no such file or directory
find: lib/modules/2.6.32-279.el6.i686': no such file or directory
find: lib/modules/2.6.32-279.el6.i686': no such file or directory
find: lib/modules/2.6.32-279.el6.i686': no such file or directory
find: lib/modules/2.6.32-279.el6.i686': no such file or directory

Is there any way I can make this disk bootable?

How to generate the initramfs and vmlinuz files?

Since this installation was updated several times, I am really not sure what was the last kernel version, but it was one of the centosplus kernels, trying to remember.

I would highly appreciate your help.

Thanks and warm regards

Do you need the data on the disk?

Yes; of course. And together with the applications the disk contains. That's the main reason I am trying to recover the Centos installation.

Moved: This thread is more suitable in <Centos> and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

Thank you onebuck. I have wondering the right place for this thread and you helped me find.

I haven't done this with dracut, but I think this still works on CentOS 6:

mount --bind /proc /mnt/sysimage/proc
mount --bind /dev /mnt/sysimage/dev
mount --bind /sys /mnt/sysimage/sys
chroot /mnt/sysimage
mkinitrd -f -v /boot/initrd-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)

The main thing is that you need to specify an installed kernel version (which is what the uname -r does). So, for example:

2.6.32-573.3.1.el6.x86_64