debugging grub.cfg

[David H. Durgee]

I have an unusual situation here on a system and thus cannot safely 
follow the usual recommendation to rerun grub-install to address a 
problem.  At present my grub.cfg file appears to have a problem that I 
am trying to correct, but I am having difficulty determining which 
statement(s) are the cause of the issue.  I have tried adding debug=all 
but then get buried in output that is of no help determining which 
statement is the problem.  I would simply like a more detailed error 
message that what I am seeing.

At present my system boots to a sh:grub> prompt and I must manually 
issue a linux, initrd and boot to start the system.  I have tried to 
track this down as follows:

sh:grub> configfile /boot/grub/grub.cfg
<screen cleared>
error: Invalid mode: auto
<blank line>
Syntax error
Incorrect command
sh:grub>

Looking at my grub.cfg shows "auto" only one place:

set gfxmode=auto

Some searching shows that this is the default, so I edited grub.cfg to 
remark this line out with the following results:

sh:grub> configfile /boot/grub/grub.cfg
error: No suitable mode found.
syntax error
Incorrect command
sh:grub>

I have also tried replacing "auto" with some specific modes, but I still 
get the "No suitable mode found." message

This is of course annoying, but I can boot maya manually by specifying:

sh:grub>linux /boot/vmlinux.... root=/dev/sda14 ro
sh:grub>initrd /boot/init....
sh:grub>boot

Any suggestions what I need to do to get my menu back? Any idea why it 
disappeared? Any further diagnostics I can run?

If it were another system I would likely simply try to 
regenerate/reinstall grub, but given all the "fun" I had getting grub to 
work here at all I would prefer another approach.  The top line 
identifes this as "GNU GRUB version 1.97~beta4" I am running.

Dave