[Techtalk] still fedup after fedora upgrade

[Meryll Larkin]

I was happily using Fedora 13 for many years, then came the expose of
heartbleed and the other openssl exploits after it and I decided that for
security reasons, it was probably time to upgrade my workstation.  You can
bet I will be writing about this unhappy and unsatisfying although
ultimately successful (with much pain) experience in my blog.  Of course the
reason I was happy in Fedora 13 for so long was because I didn't
particularly LIKE the changes that Fedora was making to the OS (as well as
Gnome2 and migrating away from MySQL)...  okay enough complaining and onto
my problem...

Every time I boot, I boot into Fedora rescue mode.  I have no choices.  That
is where it always goes.  
Maybe I should mention here that while I still had Fedora 13 I was happy
with my setting of booting to level 3 and then manually using "startx" to
boot into runlevel 5..  This option isn't available in Fedora any more, but
may help to explain how I may have arrived at my current predicament.

First the Grub menu comes up (no GUI) and says "Advanced boot options for
Fedora" - as if there SHOULD be a menu with additional choices, but there
aren't.
As this is the only item it is highlighted and then continues to boot.
After the machine is done booting, I am still without any GUI.  Here is what
it says:

    Welcome to rescue mode!  Type "systemctl default" or ^D to enter into
default mode.
    Type  "journalctl  -xb" to view system logs.  Type "systemctl reboot" to
reboot.
    Give root password for maintenance.
    Or press Control-D to continue :

If I press Control-D, I reach my beloved login prompt.  I type my username,
password, and login.
Then "startx" brings me to Gnome2  (I wish it was Gnome-Classic, which I
have installed but cannot reach).  I tried KDE, didn't like the changes
there either.  If I wanted something like this I would have preferred
Macintosh or Windows all these years over Linux.  Ooops. Complaining again,
back to problem.

I would like to fix the current situation so that I boot directly into a GUI
login - without the rescue mode step.   I suspect that the rescue mode step
is messing up other stuff too, but that is for my next post.

I have found LOTS of documentation about HOW TO BOOT into rescue mode, but
not a lot about how to fix Fedora 20 so that it does NOT boot into rescue
mode by default.
I have found and successfully followed instructions on reinstalling grub2
here:
https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/40578/how-to-reinstall-or-fix-grub
-in-fedora-20/
But it did NOT fix my situation.   FYI I have BIOS not UEFI.

I moved /boot/grub  (I had both /boot/grub and /boot/grub2)  out of my boot
directory (and saved it just in case), and that didn't change anything.  I
kept it that way.
I restored the symbolic links /etc/grub.cfg  , that didn't' change anything.
I kept it that way.
I manually edited my /boot/grub2/grub.cfg file  - which has 2 menu entries
(the second one - the normal boot was not showing up).  I swapped the 2 menu
entries to put the Heisenbug option on top and the Fedora 20 rescue option
on bottom - and that didn't change anything.  I kept it that way.  It has
remained that way through reboot in spite of the file indicating that it
should not be edited manually and that it is generated by grub2-mkconfig.

I don't mind breaking stuff because I figure out in advance how to fix it if
what I try does not work.  Any suggestions?

Meryll