help needing recovering bootloader after upgrade

[Chris Caudle]

On Tue, January 24, 2012 12:07 pm, Chris Caudle wrote:
> The bootloader was not installed properly during a F15->F16
>  upgrade, so I'm hoping someone on this list can point me in
> the correct direction to recover.


I have more detailed error information now, and I'm pretty sure I figured
out what is going on.

Using grub2-install from the rescue disk, I got this error:

"Your embedding area is unusually small.  core.img won't fit in it.
embedding is not possible, but this is required for cross-disk install"

Went through the GRUB documentation, and found this in the section on the
various modules:

"The GRUB development team generally recommends embedding GRUB before the
first partition, unless you have special requirements. You must ensure
that the first partition starts at least 31 KiB (63 sectors) from the
start of the disk; "

Used fdisk to look at the partition table, and the first partition starts
at sector 32, but the docs clearly say the first partition must start at
63 or later.

So I'm currently running GPartEd from a live disk to shift the partition
on the first drive, then I'll run grub2-install again, which should have
enough space now.  I'm fairly confident that will get the Fedora install
running again.  May have to do some repairs on the Windows partition
bootloader, depending on whether there were any pointers set at install
time to a particular sector, or whether it just starts from the beginning
of the partition.

It appears that using one large disk with multiple partitions probably
wouldn't hit this problem, but having a separate disk for the Windows
installation and the Fedora installation, along with having the first
partition on the Windows disk start unusually close to the beginning of
the disk is what caused problems on this particular system.

There were a couple of suggestions that my boot partition needed to be
significantly larger, but from what I can tell that is only needed to use
preupgrade for upgrading a system.  The grub2 files only take about 2MB,
and each kernel image still just takes about 25MB, so there should not be
anything in  normal use which needs multi hundreds of MB on /boot.

-- 
Chris Caudle