F16 Alpha GRUB install failure

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2012-02-13 at 14:25 -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:
> 
> On Feb 13, 2012, at 9:16 AM, valent.turkovic at gmail.com wrote:
> > 
> > I did Fedora 16 Respin iso install with all latest packages, including
> > latest Anaconda package, and still had this issue.
> > 
> > There were two ntfs partitions (Windows 7 + data partition) and 30 GB
> > of free space.
> > 
> > From 30GB free space I created
> > /root # 200 MB, ext4
> > /swap # 2.5 GB, swap
> > /     # 8.0 GB, ext4
> > /home # 19 GB, btrfs
> > 
> > grub2 install fails miserably :(
> > 
> > Are there any updates regarding this bug?
> 
> I think the problem is GRUB2's own install script/app, doesn't do a great job of accounting for disks partitioned where the 1st partition comes less than 35KB after the MBR, and as the core.img is too large it fails to install between the MBR and partition 1.
> 
> Strangely though, anaconda manages to get it to install without a complaint.

No, that's clearly not the problem here, because this thread is about
installing grub to the front of a partition - *not* to the MBR.

I'm not sure why it's failing for Valent when it does usually manage to
do this successfully, but it's definitely not the issue with the
post-MBR 'embedding area' being too small. That's an entirely separate
issue.

anaconda only calls grub2-install, with appropriate parameters, to
install grub. It doesn't do anything particularly special or clever.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net