Hosed Grub with the push of a button

Robert Nichols rnicholsNOSPAM at comcast.net
Fri Apr 18 03:10:11 UTC 2008


Jim Cornette wrote:
> My guess would be that the motherboard has a chip inside that has a 
> compressed image of what was originally installed on the computer, like 
> what a install CD would have. hitting that button probably launches the 
> flash image which expands it from the end of the disk on forward. That 
> would explain why it took over the tail end of the LVM partitioned off 
> space. There are probably no safeguards for the routine to check first 
> what is setup before going to town and doing its thing.

That's almost certainly what happened.  There was undoubtedly a hidden
partition at the end of the disk, and that partition got wiped out when
the Linux installer was told to use the whole disk.  Pressing the magic
button restored that hidden partition, overwriting the end of the LVM
in the process.

Simplest preventive measure is to leave that partition in place when
creating the LVM.

-- 
Bob Nichols     "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.
                 Do NOT delete it.




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