No grub2 menu display; can't boot F17

[David A. De Graaf]

I've filed the text below as
  Bug 837430 - No grub2 menu; can't boot new F17 installation

But since the grub2 developers are probably overwhelmed at this point,
and since folks on this list are usually very helpful, I'll post it
here too.  If anyone has seen this problem, or even better, has a
solution, I'd like to know.


*****************
There are so many major faults with grub2 it's hard to see where to
begin.  The most egregious are these:

1 - Instead of presenting a menu, my 64 bit machine displays an error
message box "Input not supported" which steps diagonally up the screen.
After about 30 sec the machine boots into some randomly chosen kernel.

2 - Most of the menuitems in /boot/grub2/grub.cfg are constructed
incorrectly; only a few of them can possibly start a properly functioning
system.

Taken together, it is nearly impossible to boot a new Fedora 17
system.  Item 1 means there's no way to choose among the various
kernels and item 2 means the chance of hitting a working menuitem is
slim to none.

My standard procedure over many Fedora generations is to freshly install
into alternating root partitions, keeping all the others intact.  On this
target machine I have

  /dev/sda1      /boot
  /dev/sda5      /f16
  /dev/sda6      /
  /dev/sda7      /home
  /dev/sda8      /b1
  /dev/sda9      swap
  /dev/sdb1      /h1

After completing installation of F17, /boot contained four kernels:
  vmlinuz-3.3.4-5.fc17.x86_64
  vmlinuz-3.3.6-3.fc16.x86_64
  vmlinuz-3.3.7-1.fc16.x86_64
  vmlinuz-3.4.2-1.fc16.x86_64

Commonsense dictates that grub2 would present exactly four choices.
Instead it constructs 14!

These consist of all combinations of the four kernels with the two root
partitions, with a couple of useless "Recovery" items for good measure.

This is utter nonsense.  If I can figure out which kernel is
associated with which root partition, so can grub2.


At "first boot", the machine booted an old F16 kernel combined with the
new root partition.  Unsurprisingly, nothing worked - no network, a
very short list of modules - no way to continue with the installation,
eg,   yum update   and   yum install <others>.

After much head-scratching and knashing of teeth I discovered the
problem, and hand-edited /boot/grub2/grub.cfg (despite the injunction)
and commented out all the garbage, leaving only the intended menuitem
as the first.  I also    set default=0.  With fingers crossed, I
typed   reboot   which, as F17 is prone to do, froze the machine.
After the necessary Reset, again there was no visible grub2 menu, but
it correctly booted the new vmlinuz-3.3.4-5.fc17.x86_64.  Networking
worked and I was able to continue with  yum update  and the rest of the
installation. 

This gave a new kernel - vmlinuz-3.4.4-3.fc17.x86_64 -
and I was pleasantly surprised to see the new grub.cfg had a new entry
inserted before all the rest, with all my edits retained, including   
set default=0,  so I expected it to boot the new first menuitem correctly.

Wrong!

It booted the old vmlinuz-3.3.4-5.fc17.x86_64.
Evidently, setting   default=0   is no longer effective.
This was fixed by more editing of grub.cfg, removing the old first
menuitem for vmlinuz-3.3.4-5.fc17.x86_64*.  Now I have a system that
can only boot vmlinuz-3.4.4-3.fc17.x86_64 because there's no way to
choose anything else.   But at least it boots something!!!


Some possibly relevant machine info:
/proc/cpuinfo:
  model name      : AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 840 Processor
lspci:
  00:0d.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation C61 [GeForce
  7025 / nForce 630a] (rev a2)

Although it has an nvidia video card, I haven't yet gotten around to
installing kmod-nvidia.

Clearly, something is hosed up with grub2's use of font, but I can't
see how it works or how to fix it.

On another x86_64 machine, and two i386 machines F17 grub2 displays
its menu correctly, except for its brain-dead contruction of menuitems
that cannot possibly work.


-- 
        David A. De Graaf    DATIX, Inc.    Hendersonville, NC
        dad at datix.us         www.datix.us

"Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers." (Pablo Picasso)