Guys, I have managed to get myself in a number of messes over the years, but usually when I figure out what went wrong, I understand why. Here, I'm at a complete loss. I was going to preserve my existing kernel through update and I described in an earlier email. (I'm still on kernel26-2.6.36.1) So I created a custom initramfs and preserved the module tree and added the entries to grub menu.lst. This box has always booted arch on (hd1,5) a device mapper array. (hd0) is another device mapper array with an old suse install on it. However, after I made may changes and went to reboot to test the custom initramfs, I got a grub 13 error for an invalid executable?? So I booted with the Arch 2010.05 install disk and chrooted my existing install and looked at grub. When I did my grub > find /boot/grub/stage1, grub reported stage1 on (hd0,4) (hd2,4) WTF? I don't have an hd2 and what the heck happened to hd1?? [01:42 archangel:/boot/grub] # cat device.map (hd0) /dev/mapper/nvidia_fdaacfde (hd1) /dev/mapper/nvidia_baaccaja (fd0) /dev/fd0 So I decided to give booting to hd2 a try. So I reconfigured the suse menu.lst file to call (hd2,5) to boot Arch, and I redid the Arch menu.lst to point everything at (hd2,5) instead of (hd1,5) and rebooted. To my shock and surprise - it booted just fine with all the drive number flipped from 1->2. This makes no sense whatsoever to me. How does my device.map still correctly define my (hd0) and (hd1) arrays, but grub spontaneously require booting to /dev/mapper/nvidia_baaccaja on (hd2). Damndist thing I've ever seen. It goes without saying, but I am at a complete loss as to 'what happened' and 'why it happened'. I can't even think of any way it 'could have happened'. All I did was run mkinitcpio twice to create the custom initramfs that I would use to preserve the existing kernel when I updated by running: mkinitcpio -k 2.6.36-dcr \ -c /etc/mkinitcpio.conf \ -g /boot/kernel26-dcr.img mkinitcpio -k 2.6.36-dcr \ -c /etc/mkinitcpio.conf \ -g /boot/kernel26-dcr-fallback.img \ -S autodetect And when I rebooted, I ended up in this mess. So what say the experts. Does anybody see a way running mkinitcpio as I did above could cause the grub root to change from hd1 to hd2? I don't see how it could happen. If that isn't the culprit, does anybody have any other ideas on how this could have happened? Thanks for any insight you can give. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com