Broken grub configuration installed by the F9 anaconda
Craig White
craigwhite at azapple.com
Sun May 18 17:29:21 UTC 2008
On Sun, 2008-05-18 at 13:19 -0400, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> The following happened when I upgraded one of my servers from F8 to F9. The
> machine in question uses softraid for all partitions, and the swap partition
> itself.
>
> The machine in question is a headless router, no X no gnome, and I have a
> manual entry in /etc/fstab that lets me manually mount a DVD. Anaconda
> issued a minor complaint about not being able to mount that specific
> partition, so all partitions may not be available, etc… Previous upgrades
> reported the same warning, which is generally harmless, and I can continue.
> Although I do not believe this was what caused the following issue, I'll
> just mention it for completeness' sake. The same warning came up when
> upgrading to F8, with no ill effects.
>
> Anyway, the upgrade went along its merry way. To avoid wasting any time, I
> upgraded in text mode. It's a little bit faster. Anaconda finished its
> business, and ejected the DVD. No errors reported.
>
> When I reboot, rather than the lovely grub boot menu, I immediately get
> thrown into Grub's famous "WTF do you wanna do now?" command line prompt.
> Splendid. After booting the DVD into rescue mode, the following state of
> affairs presented itself:
>
> Everything seemed to have been installed normally. No problems mounting my
> existing softraid partitions. /dev/md1 was mounted on /mnt/sysimage,
> /dev/md0 on /mnt/sysimage/boot. This is correct, and grub.conf looked
> perfectly kosher.
>
> Chrooting to /mnt/sysimage, and running "/sbin/grub-install /dev/sda"
> produced a rather loud complaint from the script about being unable to map
> the boot devices for /dev/md0 and /dev/md1. That, apparently is the problem.
> It's twofold: grub-install can't figure out what the drives are. Anaconda
> must've ran grub-install, ignored the error, and continued, business as
> usual.
>
> Outside of the chroot jail, the 'mount' command lists all the partitions.
> Once I'm chrooted into /mnt/sysimage, the 'mount' command is silent. It
> turns out that the mount command reads /etc/mtab. Outside of the chroot
> jail, /etc/mtab is a symlink to /proc/mounts. Inside the chroot jail,
> /etc/mtab is an empty file, and mount reports nothing. This, apparently,
> breaks grub-install.
>
> After replacing /etc/mtab with a symlink to /proc/mount, inside the chroot
> jail, /sbin/grub-install was happy, and I was able to reboot into F9.
> Afterwards, I had to manually remove the /etc/mtab symlink, as it was
> confusing other things.
>
> I have another machine with Fedora installed on softraid, so I'll be doing
> this again, within the next week or so.
----
I used preupgrade and I noticed that 'update existing grub' was disabled
but I chose to 'install new grub' and it worked fine. I think that this
will confuse people and I think it has something to do with differences
in grub files from F8 and F9
Craig
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