preupgrade F9 -> F10 (was rawhide)?

[Will Woods]

On Thu, 2009-03-19 at 02:16 -0400, Gerry Reno wrote:
> Gerry Reno wrote: 
> > Will Woods wrote: 
> > > 
> > > This is a GRUB bug that we've been unable to reproduce reliably, and
> > > therefore haven't traced fully. It's often triggered by using the grub
> > > --once flag, which is used by both preupgrade and suspend-to-disk
> > > (hibernate). We've seen it happen with both of those things, but the
> > > preupgrade case seems to be more frequent because it tends to also
> > > involve upgrading GRUB at the same time.
> > > 
> > > As far as we've been able to trace it, *something* causes GRUB stage2
> > > (or stage 1.5) to move its physical on-disk location. But we don't know
> > > what. Nothing that we're doing to GRUB *should* cause that. But
> > > something does, and then stage1 can't find the rest of GRUB, and we get
> > > stuck with "GRUB" on-screen and an unbootable system.
> > > 
> > > Anyway. I've spent *weeks* trying to track that one down, bugging pjones
> > > (our GRUB maintainer) and esandeen (our mad ext3/ext4 hacker) endlessly,
> > > and never made any real progress. Reinstalling GRUB, as you did, is the
> > > proper fix when this happens. But we still don't know what causes it,
> > > and therefore how to keep it from happening in the first place.

This remains a problem in F10; unsure if rawhide is also susceptible.
I'd guess yes.

> > Ok, I just ran into this nasty little problem when I did my F9 =>
> > F10 preupgrade.  All I get at the first reboot is the GRUB prompt.
> > Has any progress been made on tracking this down?  This will be a
> > real pain if I have to go through this on 14 machines.  Is there any
> > workaround to avoid this problem?

None known. You can use a rescue CD / Live image to re-run grub-install
to fix it, but that's about it.

> And I just reran the preupgrade and this time I see this message go
> by:
> Not enough space in /boot/upgrade to download install.img
> GRUBBY shows that it will download the install.img from the network.
> 
> The /boot is 100MB size on this machine.
> 
> So I did the first reboot and this time the machine booted, retrieved
> the install.img and ran anaconda.
> Maybe the GRUB prompt problem is related to my small /boot space.

It's not. We've seen this happen on plenty of machines with 200MB /boot.

-w
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