Broken grub configuration installed by the F9 anaconda

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



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.

Attachment: pgpivDt2CjzIi.pgp
Description: PGP signature

-- 
fedora-list mailing list
fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
[Index of Archives]     [Older Fedora Users]     [Fedora Announce]     [Fedora Package Announce]     [EPEL Announce]     [Fedora Magazine]     [Fedora News]     [Fedora Summer Coding]     [Fedora Laptop]     [Fedora Cloud]     [Fedora Advisory Board]     [Fedora Education]     [Fedora Security]     [Fedora Scitech]     [Fedora Robotics]     [Fedora Maintainers]     [Fedora Infrastructure]     [Fedora Websites]     [Anaconda Devel]     [Fedora Devel Java]     [Fedora Legacy]     [Fedora Desktop]     [Fedora Fonts]     [ATA RAID]     [Fedora Marketing]     [Fedora Management Tools]     [Fedora Mentors]     [SSH]     [Fedora Package Review]     [Fedora R Devel]     [Fedora PHP Devel]     [Kickstart]     [Fedora Music]     [Fedora Packaging]     [Centos]     [Fedora SELinux]     [Fedora Legal]     [Fedora Kernel]     [Fedora OCaml]     [Coolkey]     [Virtualization Tools]     [ET Management Tools]     [Yum Users]     [Tux]     [Yosemite News]     [Gnome Users]     [KDE Users]     [Fedora Art]     [Fedora Docs]     [Asterisk PBX]     [Fedora Sparc]     [Fedora Universal Network Connector]     [Libvirt Users]     [Fedora ARM]

  Powered by Linux