centos 6.2 grub fails with a black screen with a blinking cursor, but works when manually entering boot command line

Question

At $work we have a custom install of CentOS 6.2 (a pre-prepped image with a reduced set of packages).

The normal CentOS 6.2 install works fine.

The custom one fails to boot as follows:

• grub starts up and displays the defined boot options
• if we let it continue and try to boot, it gives the "a black screen with a blinking cursor" which is symptomatic of not finding the kernel
• if we go to the grub command line and manually input exactly the same boot command as grub loaded from the grub.conf, the machine boots successfully.

my google-foo is failing here, anyone have suggestions or solution?

Answer 1

The initrd is actually initramfs in CentOS6 not initrd (as in CentOS5), so it was never finding the initrd to boot. (PEBCAK :( ).

Answer 2

I suggest there are errors in your grub.conf. Try to diff your one with "normal Centos" one.