Re: grub fails boot after update

[Eric Sandeen <sandeen@sandeen.net>]

Jason White wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 02, 2008 at 10:54:38PM -0500, Eric Sandeen wrote:
>  
>> This really is grub that is busted, but I'd still just suggest using
>> ext3 to (mostly) work around the breakage for the foreseeable future.
>>
>> The other option is to teach grub to always do its io via the filesystem
>> not the block device while the fs is mounted (IIRC there are various &
>> sundry non-intuitive commands which actually nudge grub towards or away
>> from this desired behavior... --with-stage2=/path is one I think,
>> skipping the "verification" phase (i.e. trying to read the block dev
>> while mounted) is another)
> 
> Does grub 2 (still in development when last I checked) improve on this
> situation?

No idea.  Does anyone  use grub2?  My impression is that each distro is
currently just maintaining a fork of grub(1).  If grub2 is using more
than "sync and hope" I'd be pleasantly surprised.  :)

> I managed to get Grub 1 installed on machines with XFS root file systems by
> running the install from within the grub "shell" environment rather than using
> grub-install. Maybe this skips the checks that attempt to read the block
> device directly. I also recall that grub-install failed.

Yep, this might be some of the "magic" I talked about w.r.t. behavior of
different grub incantations.

-Eric