[Gllug] Upgrading to grub2

[John Edwards]

On Sun, Feb 06, 2011 at 10:27:16PM +0000, Sanatan Rai wrote:
> Folks,
>   I just upgraded two of my home systems to Squeeze.
> 
>   As part of the upgrade, I get to use grub2. Both were running
> a mostly Lenny system with a few things from testing (eg emacs).
> 
>   During the upgrade of the first system (64 bit m/c), I got the
> config screen from grub2 and chose /boot. It complained about
> installing on a partition other than the MBR. Now this system
> boots into grub but doesn't seem to see anything. How do I fix
> this?

When you say @grub but doesn't seem to see anything do you mean:
1) grub1 can not load it's config
2) grub1 can not chain load grub2
3) grub2 can not load it's config
4) grub2 can not load the kernel
5) the kernel can not load the initrd
6) the initrd can not load the rootfs

Posting the last few lines of screen output would be useful.

If your /boot directory is not on the root filesystem, check that both
versions of grub are looking at the right partition for it. And if you
are using RAID, make sure they are using the right RAID devices.

Also have a read of the Debian release notes on boot problems:
  http://www.debian.org/releases/squeeze/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html#boot-hangs

Personnally after battling with GRUB2 (v1.98) for a few days I have
reverted back to GRUB1 (v0.97). I think the problem is in the
update-grub2 script, which insists on giving the kernel /dev/sda1 as
the rootfs instead of /dev/md0 (a RAID1 of /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1).

The upgrade to debian 6.0 was also complicated by the upgrade trying
to convert some files (eg grub, fstab) to using UUIDs instead of
devices names, but failing in some places.

So my recommendation at the moment is not to upgrade the minimum at
the moment. Stick with GRUB 1 until you are sure everything else
(eg kernel, initrd, fstab) is working fine.

Apart from that Debian 6.0 is working very nicely.


-- 
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|    John Edwards   Email: john at cornerstonelinux.co.uk    |
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