Getting grub launching the installer

[David Howells]

Sam Varshavchik <mrsam at 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