After I had to change a hard drive for another my linux Opensuse 12.2 grub bootloader was broken, here are some of the learning of this debugging phase :
– Restore grub to the new disk
– Start kernel manually
– Fix hard drive references
At the end, the process to recreate the bootloader and particularly to recreate the initrd file was broken, and I assume bugged. To really make it works, I had to update the whole Linux and again at the end of the process the booloader based on grub2 was impossible to execute. The solution was to select Grub (version 1) and it worked. I assume it was possible before update the whole distribution to use yast2 booloader and choose grub instead of grub2.
When you get a message like waiting for device … to apear at boot, it may be because of the initrd does not contain the right modules to access the hard drive. It appears when the motherboard has been changed.
This article is mostly notes taken during this debugging phase … so do not consider it as an howto but as a list of command and possible way to debug this kind of issues…