For the longest time, I was able to upgrade an existing system by copying over the pxeboot vmlinuz and initrd.img, sticking them into menu.lst, and directing grub to load them.
Up until F14 this worked fine. F15's pxeboot/vmlinuz made me stare at a blank screen, and the only available option, apparently, was the three- fingered salute. I wrote it off as an F15 glitch.
Now, same story with F16. Looks like I have to do a real PXE boot. No big deal, but it's a pain. Grub was much easier – copy two files over, edit menu.lst, and I'm done.
I don't seem to find this installation method documented, just wondering if it's gone for good, or this is just my problem.
On 12/11/11 14:04, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
For the longest time, I was able to upgrade an existing system by copying over the pxeboot vmlinuz and initrd.img, sticking them into menu.lst, and directing grub to load them.
Up until F14 this worked fine. F15's pxeboot/vmlinuz made me stare at a blank screen, and the only available option, apparently, was the three-fingered salute. I wrote it off as an F15 glitch.
Now, same story with F16. Looks like I have to do a real PXE boot. No big deal, but it's a pain. Grub was much easier – copy two files over, edit menu.lst, and I'm done.
I don't seem to find this installation method documented, just wondering if it's gone for good, or this is just my problem.
Cant you do: fpo boot? http://boot.fedoraproject.org/faq
Frank Murphy writes:
On 12/11/11 14:04, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
For the longest time, I was able to upgrade an existing system by copying over the pxeboot vmlinuz and initrd.img, sticking them into menu.lst, and directing grub to load them.
Up until F14 this worked fine. F15's pxeboot/vmlinuz made me stare at a blank screen, and the only available option, apparently, was the three-fingered salute. I wrote it off as an F15 glitch.
Now, same story with F16. Looks like I have to do a real PXE boot. No big deal, but it's a pain. Grub was much easier – copy two files over, edit menu.lst, and I'm done.
I don't seem to find this installation method documented, just wondering if it's gone for good, or this is just my problem.
Cant you do: fpo boot? http://boot.fedoraproject.org/faq
I'll have to see if it has an option to install from the installation media on my LAN server, rather than just the public servers, over the Internet, as the FAQ seems to indicate.
On Sat, 12 Nov 2011 09:04:33 -0500, SV (Sam) wrote:
For the longest time, I was able to upgrade an existing system by copying over the pxeboot vmlinuz and initrd.img, sticking them into menu.lst, and directing grub to load them.
Up until F14 this worked fine. F15's pxeboot/vmlinuz made me stare at a blank screen, and the only available option, apparently, was the three- fingered salute. I wrote it off as an F15 glitch.
Now, same story with F16. Looks like I have to do a real PXE boot. No big deal, but it's a pain. Grub was much easier – copy two files over, edit menu.lst, and I'm done.
I don't seem to find this installation method documented, just wondering if it's gone for good, or this is just my problem.
What kind of machine is it?
Using the vmlinuz+initrd.img pair from the 'isolinux' directory continues to work. Add boot option repo=... or askmethod as appropriate.
Michael Schwendt writes:
On Sat, 12 Nov 2011 09:04:33 -0500, SV (Sam) wrote:
For the longest time, I was able to upgrade an existing system by copying over the pxeboot vmlinuz and initrd.img, sticking them into menu.lst, and directing grub to load them.
Up until F14 this worked fine. F15's pxeboot/vmlinuz made me stare at a blank screen, and the only available option, apparently, was the three- fingered salute. I wrote it off as an F15 glitch.
Now, same story with F16. Looks like I have to do a real PXE boot. No big deal, but it's a pain. Grub was much easier – copy two files over, edit menu.lst, and I'm done.
I don't seem to find this installation method documented, just wondering if it's gone for good, or this is just my problem.
What kind of machine is it?
No-name 1U rack. Pair of SATA drives. 4 gigs of RAM.
Using the vmlinuz+initrd.img pair from the 'isolinux' directory continues to work. Add boot option repo=... or askmethod as appropriate.
I'll have to try this. But it'll have to be some other time. F16 grub2 barfed and refused to install, when I got around to installing it via PXE. The machine survived a reboot, thanks to the F15 version of grub that was left intact. Removed grub2, installed F16 grub, applied all updates. The reinstalled grub now barfs on reboot with 'Error 16'. Can't go any further, so I'm just bringing it up in rescue over PXE, making a backup over the network, and I'll have to install everything from scratch. Stick a fork in me, I'm done.
On Sat, 12 Nov 2011 13:45:30 -0500, SV (Sam) wrote:
F16 grub2 barfed and refused to install, when I got around to installing it via PXE. The machine survived a reboot, thanks to the F15 version of grub that was left intact. Removed grub2, installed F16 grub, applied all updates. The reinstalled grub now barfs on reboot with 'Error 16'. Can't go any further,
At this point I would have expected a brief comment on what you've tried to examine the reason for this error. Error 16 is documented and smells like you've made GRUB 1 load an incompatible config file, e.g. perhaps the one from GRUB 2?
Michael Schwendt writes:
On Sat, 12 Nov 2011 13:45:30 -0500, SV (Sam) wrote:
F16 grub2 barfed and refused to install, when I got around to installing it via PXE. The machine survived a reboot, thanks to the F15 version of grub that was left intact. Removed grub2, installed F16 grub, applied all updates. The reinstalled grub now barfs on reboot with 'Error 16'. Can't go any further,
At this point I would have expected a brief comment on what you've tried to examine the reason for this error. Error 16 is documented and smells like you've made GRUB 1 load an incompatible config file, e.g. perhaps the one from GRUB 2?
Oh yes, I tried pretty much everything I could think of. Rerun /sbin/grub- install alone. Rerun /sbin/grub-install with the --root-directory option. Re- fsck /boot. Resync the mdraid volume that /boot lives on. Error 16 is documented as grub being unable to parse the filesystem where the stage 1.5 files are. As far I could tell, everything was kosher. Device.map was good. F16 grub refuses to boot, end of story. Given that, in F16, grub was deprecated I pretty much decided to cut my losses, copy my files off this machine, and load a fresh install of F16. I already spent half my day on this.
So, I loaded a new F16 install. Anaconda obediently created my mdraid volumes, installed everything without a complaint, this time. So, looking forward to resuming normal life again, I rebooted, only to be told by grub2 that it can't find the volume by UUID. The end.
Two F16 reinstalls later, each time fiddling with the mdraid partition layouts, yet each time producing the same results, I found http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F16_bugs#Cannot_boot_with_.2Fboot_parti...
Great, except for the part where it doesn't say /where/ to add this, in the massive grub.cfg hairball. I sort of figured it out, and spent the rest of the today restoring the data on this machine, from my backups.
On Sun, 2011-11-13 at 08:13 -0500, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
Two F16 reinstalls later, each time fiddling with the mdraid partition layouts, yet each time producing the same results, I found http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F16_bugs#Cannot_boot_with_.2Fboot_parti...
Great, except for the part where it doesn't say /where/ to add this, in the massive grub.cfg hairball.
Sorry about that - I write the common bugs entries (well, most of them) and often I don't have personal experience of the issue so I just have to go on what notes I have from the bug report. That was the best I could do for that issue!
On Sat, 12 Nov 2011, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
For the longest time, I was able to upgrade an existing system by copying over the pxeboot vmlinuz and initrd.img, sticking them into menu.lst, and directing grub to load them.
Up until F14 this worked fine. F15's pxeboot/vmlinuz made me stare at a blank screen, and the only available option, apparently, was the three-fingered salute. I wrote it off as an F15 glitch.
How long did you wait? I updated a few days ago, but it took perhaps a couple of minutes before it should anything other than a blank screen.
Michael Young
lör 2011-11-12 klockan 09:04 -0500 skrev Sam Varshavchik:
For the longest time, I was able to upgrade an existing system by copying over the pxeboot vmlinuz and initrd.img, sticking them into menu.lst, and directing grub to load them.
This is also how I install. Have worked fine with both F15 & F16 for me.
Things you can try are
a) Disable kms.
b) Turn on more debug output from the kernel
Regards Henrik
Sam Varshavchik mrsam@courier-mta.com wrote:
Up until F14 this worked fine. F15's pxeboot/vmlinuz made me stare at a blank screen, and the only available option, apparently, was the three- fingered salute. I wrote it off as an F15 glitch.
Now, same story with F16. Looks like I have to do a real PXE boot. No big deal, but it's a pain. Grub was much easier – copy two files over, edit menu.lst, and I'm done.
It took a long time to load from grub1 for me too - several minutes. Loading it by hand from grub2 was much quicker. I had the joy of doing the latter as two of the three machines I upgraded to F-16 failed to boot thereafter.
On one I had /boot on RAID1. The installer generated a blank grub.cfg file [BZ 750794], but I managed to coax it to dracut and thence to chroot on the main rootfs. (The dracut shell is horrible to use btw - no recallable, editable command line history). Then I managed to fill in the grub.cfg file. _Why_ does dracut not load the md module unless the raid modules are loaded in grub?!
On the other, the installer failed to generate an initramfs file, though the grub2 installation was perfectly fine. Rerunning the upgrade (by hand from grub2's cli - I'd put the PXE images onto /boot and they were still there) fixed that.
All in all, yesterday wasn't entirely fun.
David
David Howells writes:
It took a long time to load from grub1 for me too - several minutes. Loading it by hand from grub2 was much quicker. I had the joy of doing the latter as two of the three machines I upgraded to F-16 failed to boot thereafter.
I waited 10-15 minutes, no go.
On one I had /boot on RAID1. The installer generated a blank grub.cfg file [BZ 750794], but I managed to coax it to dracut and thence to chroot on the
Been there.
main rootfs. (The dracut shell is horrible to use btw - no recallable, editable command line history). Then I managed to fill in the grub.cfg file. _Why_ does dracut not load the md module unless the raid modules are loaded in grub?!
At least you ended up with a bootable system. I had to back up (in rescue mode), wipe, reinstall, and restore a server because grub2 wouldn't install at all, during upgrade, because of bug 737508 (and I had no idea what was wrong, other than total foobar-age, Google was useless, and I didn't know that I could simply shave a megabyte off /boot to give grub2 more space to sit in), and F16's grub persistently complained about "Error 16", no matter how much I re-fscked and resynced /boot.
At least it looks like now that this'll get fixed for F17.
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Adam Williamson -
David Howells -
Frank Murphy -
Henrik Nordström -
M A Young -
Michael Schwendt -
Sam Varshavchik