Andrew Brown wrote:
On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 6:16 PM, Michael DeHaan
<mdehaan(a)redhat.com
<mailto:mdehaan@redhat.com>> wrote:
Andrew Brown wrote:
> Okay, a few things since yesterday:
> I'm not worrying about the hard drive device issue for the
moment, it
> seems to be related to whether the bladecenter media tray is
assigned
> to that blade or not.
>
> I've also edited the code to ignore listed partitions of type
"Empty"
> or "Extended"
Is there a new attachment we can look at for this?
I've attached the most recent base.cfg which contains the code. Keep
in mind that today I did things manually though, not using the script.
>
> But somehow the process isn't working. I followed the process very
> closely of xcat, a similar provisioning engine. After taking and
> restoring an image, it doesn't boot.
>
>
> I tried the process manually today. That is, I booted with a
live cd
> and ran each command myself. Saved the mbr, saved the partition
table
> with sfdisk, and saved the contents of each partition of a freshly
> installed linux installation.
>
> Then I went to the next blade, identical hardware and setup, and
> booted the live cd up.
> -Restored partition entries with sfdisk
> -Restored mbr with dd
> -Restored partitions again with sfdisk. I don't fully
understand why
> it's done again, this was just following the xcat process (for
which
> I can post the exact code if anyone's curious).
> -And of course restore all partitions one at a time
>
> When I tried to boot it back up, it got as far as printing
"GRUB" and
> hung there. I need some help here, I'm not sure what's going on.
One thing to check is to stop before rebooting and see if grub is
installed correctly, or if any errors happen during grub-install.
For
that, it may be worth running through the script line by line or at
least logging the output of each step w/ debug output printed before
each command as needed.
Like I said, I did the entire procedure manually... entered each
command myself so I knew exactly what was running. Once I get it
working manually, I can easily find out if my script is doing things
any differently.
How do I tell if grub is installed correctly?
"grubby" has some probe options that should do this. See "man
grubby"?
>
> I tried a different order to restoring partition/mbr info: Restore
> partition stuff with sfdisk, and then the mbr with dd. I was
thinking
> sfdisk may have overwritten the mbr or something, but I got the same
> results.
Grub lives in the MBR, though are you calling grub-install after
all of
that?
Right. I'm not calling grub-install. I didn't think it was
necessary. Grub lives in the mbr, which is the first 512 bytes of the
drive. I'm saving the mbr to a file and restoring it back. Shouldn't
that be sufficient?
In theory, assuming it's not a GPT partition /and/ grub lives in the MBR
(both of which can't really be assumed), yes.
It's best to use grubby, the command line tool, for manipulating
grub. As a bonus it also knows how to manipulate lilo and elilo.
There is some code in koan that references a few common grubby commands,
though you'll probably want to change this around.
--bad-image-ok does not work, but otherwise what you see koan using for
the live CD is close.
Also there are some bits of the live config script that are using
grub-install.