Gerry Reno wrote:
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

One more thing about the grub-install script idea.  I found that you need to add the --grub-shell=full_path to the grub-install line to get the grub-install to work.

Regards,
Gerry