Will Woods wrote:
On Thu, 2009-03-19 at 02:16 -0400, Gerry Reno wrote:
> Gerry Reno wrote:
>
>> Will Woods wrote:
>>
>>> This is a GRUB bug that we've been unable to reproduce reliably, and
>>> therefore haven't traced fully. It's often triggered by using the
grub
>>> --once flag, which is used by both preupgrade and suspend-to-disk
>>> (hibernate). We've seen it happen with both of those things, but the
>>> preupgrade case seems to be more frequent because it tends to also
>>> involve upgrading GRUB at the same time.
>>>
>>> As far as we've been able to trace it, *something* causes GRUB stage2
>>> (or stage 1.5) to move its physical on-disk location. But we don't know
>>> what. Nothing that we're doing to GRUB *should* cause that. But
>>> something does, and then stage1 can't find the rest of GRUB, and we get
>>> stuck with "GRUB" on-screen and an unbootable system.
>>>
>>> Anyway. I've spent *weeks* trying to track that one down, bugging pjones
>>> (our GRUB maintainer) and esandeen (our mad ext3/ext4 hacker) endlessly,
>>> and never made any real progress. Reinstalling GRUB, as you did, is the
>>> proper fix when this happens. But we still don't know what causes it,
>>> and therefore how to keep it from happening in the first place.
>>>
This remains a problem in F10; unsure if rawhide is also susceptible.
I'd guess yes.
>> Ok, I just ran into this nasty little problem when I did my F9 =>
>> F10 preupgrade. All I get at the first reboot is the GRUB prompt.
>> Has any progress been made on tracking this down? This will be a
>> real pain if I have to go through this on 14 machines. Is there any
>> workaround to avoid this problem?
>>
None known. You can use a rescue CD / Live image to re-run grub-install
to fix it, but that's about it.
> And I just reran the preupgrade and this time I see this message go
> by:
> Not enough space in /boot/upgrade to download install.img
> GRUBBY shows that it will download the install.img from the network.
>
> The /boot is 100MB size on this machine.
>
> So I did the first reboot and this time the machine booted, retrieved
> the install.img and ran anaconda.
> Maybe the GRUB prompt problem is related to my small /boot space.
>
It's not. We've seen this happen on plenty of machines with 200MB /boot.
-w
Thanks for clarifying the issue.
Is there anyway I could get anaconda to process a "grub-install" script
as a post-install during preupgrade?
Regards,
Gerry