recent kernel upgrades damage mbr
Gene Heskett
gene.heskett at verizon.net
Tue Jun 17 17:48:32 UTC 2008
On Tuesday 17 June 2008, Mark Haney wrote:
>Maurizio Marini wrote:
>> I would advice any list member that it is in the wild a issue regarding
>> grub and mbr.
>>
>> I invite who has not yet done it, to save mbr on a secure place before any
>> kernel or grub related upgrade, dd is your friend.
>> In the meantime fedora experts and developers are at work (hopefully) to
>> investigate and solve this issue.
>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=450143
>>
>> man adviced, man half saved
>>
>> -m
>
>While I'm certainly an advocate for 'better safe than sorry', I've never
>seen a problem with the MBR on a kernel upgrade or install. Ever. And
>I've been building kernels since mid '97 or so.
I'll agree with Mark here. I rarely run the fedora kernel for much more time
than it takes to go get the latest from kernel.org and build/install it &
reboot. 2.6.26-rc6 running ATM for about 20 hours now, I was busy and therefore
a day + slow.
>That said, this subject line is really misleading and should really be
>more about grub than kernels, since grub upgrade do affect the mbr and
>kernel upgrades (in my experience) don't.
I wouldn't call it misleading, this old fart isn't known to be that kind.
>I read this subject line and freaked since I had just updated one of my
>servers to the latest kernel and was rebooting as I read it. Of course,
>it came up fine, so I did some research and wanted to clarify this post
>some.
Common sense says a kernel upgrade, unless the kernel is horribly broken, cannot
possibly effect the mbr.
However, I have had, in the past 2 years of trying to use the nvidia binaries, 2
separate instances of having the mbr of the boot drive wiped, so clean the last
time that the mbr had only 1 non-zero byte in it, and both occurred as I was
experiencing something in the display going bonkers which in turn forced a
reset button reboot, it was frozen solid halfway through a screen switch.
Switching to an older ATI card about mid-February seems to have stopped that.
Make of it what you will, but my suspicions will forever point at nvidia.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact
mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows.
- Frank Zappa
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