Until yesterday I had two hard drives in my Fedora 13 box.

Hard disk 1 - /dev/sda was a 200GB Western Digital and hard disk 2 - /dev/sdb is a 500GB Samsung containing my Fedora 13 installation.

The Western Digital, after many years of faithful service has died, and so I removed it because it was hanging Fedora's udev disk detection routines on bootup.

Knowing that my grub device.map and menu.lst (grub.conf) would have changed due to the disk removal I used a Fedora 13 Live CD to re-installed grub and edit my /boot/grub/device.map so that it said that the Samsung drive was "(hd0) /dev/sda" and that grub.conf had all it's kernel "root" entries pointing to the correct hard drive and partition.

That's were the problem started. On reboot I could select the current kernel from the Grub loader, or just let it boot to the default, and as soon as I'd done either it would reboot.

The problem ended up being the "splashimage" parameter in grub.conf. It was pointing to (hd1,1). So when booting with default options it caused a reboot because it couldn't find the splashimage.

A work-around was to edit the grub root line at each reboot which seemed to bypass the splash search and allow a boot.

But the fix was to edit grub.conf to make the splashimage parameter correct as shown here:

# previous entry from when I had two hard disks.
splashimage=(hd1,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz

# after hard disk removal the 2nd hardisk became the 1st and so was now hd0
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE:  You have a /boot partition.  This means that
#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
#          root (hd0,1)
#          kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/mapper/vg_bb-lv_root
#          initrd /initrd-[generic-]version.img
#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=15
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora (2.6.33.5-124.fc13.i686)
        root (hd0,1)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.33.5-124.fc13.i686 ro root=/dev/mapper/vg_bb-lv_root rd_LVM_LV=vg_bb/lv_root rd_LVM_LV=vg_bb/lv_swap rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_MD rd_NO_DM LANG=en_AU.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us rhgb quiet
        initrd /initramfs-2.6.33.5-124.fc13.i686.img