[fedora-virt] Fedora11-Preview without GRUB

[Mark McLoughlin]

On Thu, 2009-04-30 at 11:23 +0200, Ján ONDREJ (SAL) wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 10:18:11AM +0100, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > On Wed, 2009-04-29 at 11:58 +0200, Ján ONDREJ (SAL) wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > > 
> > >   after my rawhide installation was corrupted, I planned to install a fresh
> > > Fedora11-Preview in virt-manager. Everything worked well, just GRUB has been
> > > not installed.
> > 
> > I think the cause of this was actually a generic grub/anaconda issue -
> > I'm sure I've seen other reports of grub failing with F11 virt preview.
> > I think it's been known to hang in the "installing bootloader" installer
> > step? I can't find any references now, anyone else seen it?
> 
> Installation worked well, just after installation an reboot qemu only shows:
> 
> Booting from Hard Disk ...
> 
> and nothing else. :(

Okay, I've just tried an F11-Preview install and it worked for me, grub
installed just fine.

> > >  I can't fix this by running some commands in rescue mode.
> > > My attempts are here:
> > > 
> > > sh-4.0# df /boot
> > > Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> > > /dev/vda1               198337     13573    174524   8% /boot
> > > 
> > > My root partition is /dev/vda1, so my root disk is /dev/vda (paravirtualized
> > > disk).
> > > 
> > > sh-4.0# grub-install /dev/vda
> > > expr: non-numeric argument
> > > /dev/vda1 does not have any corresponding BIOS drive.
> > 
> > With the fix (i.e. grub-0.97-50.fc11) for:
> > 
> >   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/479760
> 
> May be this will help, but I can't test it now.

No, it won't help the problem you saw where anaconda didn't install the
bootloader because anaconda/booty doesn't suffer from this grub-install
issue ... it just runs:

Note, anaconda/booty doesn't suffer from the grub-install problem
because it does:

Running... ['/sbin/grub-install', '--just-copy']
Running... ['/sbin/grub', '--batch', '--no-floppy', '--device-map=/boot/grub/device.map']


    GNU GRUB  version 0.97  (640K lower / 3072K upper memory)

 [ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported.  For the first word, TAB
   lists possible command completions.  Anywhere else TAB lists the possible
   completions of a device/filename.]
grub> root (hd0,0)
 Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
grub> install --stage2=/boot/grub/stage2 /grub/stage1 d (hd0) /grub/stage2 p (hd0,0)/grub/grub.conf
grub> 

> > you need to actually pass it the device map:
> > 
> >   $> grub --device-map=/boot/grub/device.map
> 
> It's not default?

No device.map is used by default. And AFAIK, you need one with virtio
because the BIOS doesn't know anything about the drive.

Cheers,
Mark.