F8 GRUB cannot access F9-Beta root

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 04 Apr 2008 11:21:44 -0400, Will Woods wrote:

> > First, Anaconda gave a traceback
> > upon being told to use a GRUB device other than MBR. 
> 
> Hm. What's your disk layout like? What device were you telling it to
> use?

/dev/sda8 = the root partition for F9-Beta/Rawhide

Nothing special. Has worked before many times, also with F9-Alpha.

> > Then, during the next attempt, I installed GRUB into MBR. But after
> > restoring F8's GRUB, I found out that it cannot access F9-Beta's root
> > partition. 
> 
> Did you encrypt F9b's disk?

No.

> It'd be kind of tricky for GRUB to read
> that, obviously.
> 
> How did you restore F8's GRUB?

grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> configfile /grub/grub.conf
grub> boot

to boot into F8, then:

# grub-install /dev/sda

to overwrite the MBR. Not much magic here. All that matters is
that F9 GRUB in MBR fails to find files in F9 root, e.g.

grub> root (hd0,7)
root (hd0,7)
 Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
grub> configfile /boot/grub/grub.conf

errors out and

grub> find /boot/grub/grub.conf

does not find /boot/grub/grub.conf on /dev/sda8, but all other
grub.conf from other installations. Just nothing on (hd0,7).

> > That would have been my way to boot into it from the
> >  command-line. But it fails to find /boot/grub/grub.conf on it and
> >  errors out (2: Bad file or directory type) even if I specify it
> >  myself. 
> 
> > It seems to be incompatible with F9.
> 
> That seems unlikely; more likely is that there was some mixed-up
> configuration generated by anaconda at some point.

Highly doubtful. F9 GRUB (which I installed into /dev/sda8 now from
within a chroot) has no trouble finding grub.conf files everywhere:

grub> find /boot/grub/grub.conf
find /boot/grub/grub.conf
 (hd0,7)
 (hd0,9)
 (hd1,6)
 (hd1,8)

F8 GRUB, however, does not find files on (hd0,7).

> If you can give us some details of how your partitions etc. are set up,
> I can try to reproduce your problem so we can fix it.

Enter Fedora 8 GRUB command-line, then tell me whether you can find
files on the Fedora 9 root partition.