preupgrade grub2 failed: now can't boot

[don fisher]

On 02/07/12 22:05, linux guy wrote:
> I got around all this mess by upgrading from the full install DVD.   I
> found the problem to exist only when updating from the live CDs or pre
> upgrading.  If I did my upgrade from the full install DVD, everything
> worked out OK.
>
> If you need more information, I could go back and look at my notes.
Linux guy,

My question was different but related to this thread.
since Redhat-3 I have been able to duplicate by systems using fdisk, 
mkfs, and rsync. In those days it was easy to install lilo on the 
replicated system disk to be.

I am still trying to do the same thing using F16. I had an rather 
unfortunate experience with Ubuntu and wish to convert all of my 
machines to F16.

I cannot find a discussion describing why the current F16 distribution 
uses such a complicated partition scheme. I generally opt for two 
partitions, a / partition and a swap partition. /boot lives under /. My 
current system, working great, is (from fdisk):

    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048   935733247   467865600   83  Linux
/dev/sda2       935733248   976773119    20519936   82  Linux swap / Solaris

I purchased a couple of disks so I could replicate this system to my 
other machines. First problem was that the disks are GPT, so fdisk will 
not work (please fix it!). I used parted to make the partitions with the 
first partition starting at 2048 (I didn't know why at the time, I just 
copied what the full distribution disk had done on install). The 
partitions on the new disk are (from parted --list):

Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt

Number  Start   End    Size    File system     Name     Flags
  1      1049kB  730GB  730GB   ext4            primary  boot
  2      730GB   750GB  20.2GB  linux-swap(v1)  primary

But now I cannot find a method to make the disk bootable. I found the 
following web page:

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/grub-2.html

which describes a tool called grub2-mkrescue F16. As I understand, it 
will make a bootable CD that contains grub2 that will boot the system on 
you hard drive. One can then us the grub2-mkconfig, or maybe 
grub2-install to make the new drive bootable.

But the grub2-mkrescue fails looking for xorriso:

grub2-mkrescue -o bootableGrub.iso
Enabling BIOS support ...
/usr/bin/grub2-mkrescue: line 310: xorriso: command not found

Should this work? Please advise.

Thanks,
Don