Please stop replying as private messages, after all we are on a mailing-list and everybody wants to profit from solutions and replies. Thanks. On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 12:05 PM, John Connor wrote:

Grub2 is a little confusing after grub legacy. The main (admin) difference is that the menu is designed to be automatically produced. Of course, it is possible to hand-edit /boot/grub2/grub.cfg, but this file gets rewritten every time there is a kernel update.

How it works: /etc/grub.d contains a number of scripts which basically look for operating systems on the HDD. The scripts are executed by the grub update scripts (on my 12.2 Open Suse this is actually grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg), each script basically contributes part of the menu - for example, if you have multi-boot, then the os-prober should find the other systems (Windows, other Linuxes etc.) and create corresponding menu entries. You can remove menu entries by changing the corresponding scripts from executable to non-executable.

/etc/default/grub is used to set common parameters such as the menu timeout, the default system to boot (for a multiboot system), kernel boot parameters and so on. In the comments at the beginning of this file it should tell you what you have to run if the file is changed - in 12.2 the exact same script is also used for processing the /etc/grub.d scripts to set up the whole menu.

So, I would suggest that you first check that all the scripts in /etc/grub.d are in fact executable - if not, make them so and rerun the grub update script (as noted in /etc/default/grub comments).

If the scripts are all executable and it still doesn't work, it means that the update script can't find the kernel in the boot partition. The specific script which makes the entry for booting the Open Suse Linux kernel is /etc/grub.d/10_linux. It could be that this script is missing or corrupt, or that grub2 itself was messed up by the update (the script gets its boot device from grub2).

thanks for the reply, I kinda figured ballpark as you wrote down, and also saw those scripts and roughly looked at them, still I wasnt exactly sure how grubmkconfig was populating that cfg file, as I said, when repairing the badly behaving 12.3 via usb key, it did show grub2 menu properly, and I managed to save that normally looking cfg file too, but during the early runtime there was that additional script executed which messed the cfg up again and reduced it to memtest as the only entry. so I was wondering if those grub2 scripts did look into the rpm database for kernel packages, or into the /boot/ path for kernel files or how that all worked, or why my entries got deleted :( also when I was first experimenting and hadnt figured out that my cfg had been reduced, I tried to mkinitrd and that wasnt outputting anything at all, so maybe it was some messed up rpm database or something? meanwhile I also figured that some rpm packages seem not to be listed in the rpm database any more. I am a long time squid user, and it is running in this apparently semi-fixed 12.3, but the rpm -aq doesnt list any squid packages at all. so maybe I am gonna take a look at packages and fore-reinstall packages that seem to be missing in the rpm database. is there a list of default (deployed via that images system during clean install?) list of packages that get installed on a clean current opensuse if I only click through the default buttons during clean install and dont select any additional stuff? how can I reinstall all default packages forcefully yet only write the binary files or something to the disk, but not kill my config files wherever it applies. maybe this whole dang system is messed up beyond fixability. sigh. thanks. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org