Gerry Reno wrote:
Will Woods wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-11-07 at 17:40 +0000, Camilo Mesias wrote:
>
>> A quick update on this. I successfully upgraded one machine about a
>> week ago, so I tried another machine today and it had a problem
>> booting during the install.
>>
>> After all the packages had been downloaded and the 'reboot' button was
>> pressed, grub was no longer able to come up. The word 'GRUB' was
>> displayed and nothing else.
>>
>> I booted with the F9 Live USB and did the following (sorry it doesn't
>> help with diagnosis but it might help if anyone else has this problem)
>>
>> mkdir /tmp/rootdir
>> mount /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 /tmp/rootdir
>> mount /dev/sda1 /tmp/rootdir/boot
>> /tmp/rootdir/sbin/grub-install --root-directory=/tmp/rootdir /dev/sda
>>
>> If there are any logs that might help diagnose the problem, let me
>> know. I have one more desktop and one more laptop running F9 which I
>> plan to preupgrade in the same way, Please let me know if there is
>> anything I should note to help improve the process.
>>
>
> 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.
>
> Any further help or theories on this would be greatly appreciated.
>
> -w
>
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?
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.
Regards,
Gerry