grub, the disappearing xfs /boot and error 15

[idiotprogrammer]

Hi, I've been trying to install gentoo. i am having strange problems with /boot and grub.

hda has two different partitions of windows. it owns the mbr.
hdb has gentoo. /dev/hdb1 has /boot

when /boot is unmounted, i still see the files on the fs. and when I mount /boot (and the command line says that the mount was successful), the files in the /boot directory disappear. Then when I umount the /boot partition, everything appears again!

fstab says this
/dev/hdb1 /boot xfs noauto,noatime 1 2

I know the instructions say that for /boot should be ext2. i forgot. I made it xfs.
when i run grub and do these two commands

root (hd1, 0) and setup (hd1,0)

it will say checking for stage 1 file, but it will be unable to find. (with error code 15)

I feel pretty sure that when it tries to mount /boot, it is not seeing anything, just like what I find when I do it on a command line.

What is happening here? And how do I correct it?

Robert Nagle www.idiotprogrammer.com

[delta407]

Okay, here's what the deal is. /boot isn't mounted automatically, and when it's not mounted, it appears just like any other directory; i.e. you can copy files to and from as you like. But, they don't end up in your /boot parition, the end up in your root partition under the boot directory. Try this:

[idiotprogrammer]

Besides helping me with my problem, I learned a few things I didn't know about mounting. Thanks! Really, linux classes should make students install gentoo as a learning activity. It's very educational! rj

[idiotprogrammer]

if anyone has a similiar problem, let me mention that i had trouble remounting it after doing what delta407 said. I had to run xfs_repair and that did the trick. Everything ok. rj