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