Tech questions on Grub2 and use of gparted on Fedora 16.

[Michael D. Setzer II]

Possible a little off topic, but issues effect Fedora 16 sytems and 
grub2. Haven't been able to find detailed info on exactly what is 
going on with the grub2. If someone knows the info, or where I 
could find it. Thanks.


Just ran into some strange issues with grub2 and not sure what 
happened. Did the process on some machines, and it worked fine, 
and others it did not. Not sure if it was something with the 
grub2-install process, or using gparted.

I have systems that were updated to Fedora 16 as clean install 
from DVD using a custom setup, since machines already had XP 
and Fedora 14, but had it wipe the old system. It had the grub2 
boot system setup, but had the first partition for the XP starting at 
sector 63, but all seemed fine.

Later I did the grub2-install --recheck and it gave a message 
about the area being to small.

On a test system, I booted with a parted magic cd, and reduced 
the size of the boot partition from 1024M to 1023M (sda2) and 
moved it to the right. Rebooted and everything was ok. Rebooted 
from the parted magic cd, and moved the XP partition (sda1) over 
to the right. Rebooted. No problem. Then ran the grub2-install 
--recheck and it went thru with no problem. So, ran it again without 
the recheck process, and everything seemed to work fine. So I 
wanted to do the same with the other systems.

The Fedora 16 has the same version of gparted, so I did the 
resizing, and moving within Fedora 16. 

No error messages, but the grub not boot. Would come up with 
the first little grub message, but then restart.  Did know how much 
of the disk, the grub2 was using so copied the 2048 sectors from 
the working system, and restored it. That got the grub2 working, 
but then the windows XP wasn't. Had to reformat the partition, and 
then restore the ntfsclone image of it and now things seem to be 
ok. 

But would like to know what sectors grub2 is actually using on the 
system. In the past, copying the first track would be enough, but 
on a clean install system the starting of the first partition is 2048? 
Is it using all that.

Even thou the partitions were not mounted in Fedora 16 when 
using gparted, perhaps the Fedora 16 didn't not the changes 
during the shutdown process and could have been using the data 
at boot? 

The XP could have been doing the same thing of writing 
something outside the actual partitions.


+----------------------------------------------------------+
  Michael D. Setzer II -  Computer Science Instructor      
  Guam Community College  Computer Center                  
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[Alan Cox]

On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:36:36 +1000
"Michael D. Setzer II" <mikes(a)kuentos.guam.net&gt; wrote:

>  Possible a little off topic, but issues effect Fedora 16 sytems and 
>  grub2. Haven't been able to find detailed info on exactly what is 
>  going on with the grub2. If someone knows the info, or where I 
>  could find it. Thanks. 
Its in theory in the grub2 documentation.

>  Later I did the grub2-install --recheck and it gave a message 
>  about the area being to small. 
Ah you touched it. Don't do that, the Fedora setup is so fragile.
You need to do the grub2-install and tell it to use a map file.



Alan