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Fairly recently I have updated my laptop to the latest Fedora Core. I also have several other Linux distributions on this laptop as well. I use the Grub installer from SuSE, since the GFX menu works across all of the menus I have. After installing Fedora I didn’t do much afterwards and I pretty much have had my laptop off for over a week. Today, I felt like finishing up and reinstalling Grub from the SuSE partition. I booted into SuSE and ran grub-install which completed successfully. I rebooted to boot into Fedora but I got a “Error 2: unknown file or directory type”. I thought maybe the partition wasn’t cleanly unmounted.

I booted into SuSE again and ran a fsck on the partition which finished with no errors. After rebooting once again the same message appeared. I did some searching and found that starting with e2fsprogs >= 1.40.5 by default all file systems are created with 256 byte inodes. In previous versions this used to be 128 bytes. There were a few things I could do to fix this. I could use the Grub from Fedora, patch SuSE’s or install Fedora’s boot loader to its partition instead of the MBR. I chose the last option. In Fedora, you will need to run grub-install <device> where <device> represents the partition where your Fedora installation is located. Once you have done that you will need to modify menu.lst usually located in /boot/grub/. Here is an example of the entry you will need to make.

title Fedora
    rootnoverify (hd0,X)
    chainloader +1

You will need to change X to the partition where Fedora is located. Also, if you have another disk you might have to change the first digit too.