Bug 136158 - grubonce doesn't work due to grub install problem - stage2 wrong
Summary: grubonce doesn't work due to grub install problem - stage2 wrong
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: SUSE LINUX 10.0
Classification: openSUSE
Component: YaST2 (show other bugs)
Version: Final
Hardware: i586 SuSE Linux 10.0
: P5 - None : Normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Torsten Duwe
QA Contact: Klaus Kämpf
URL:
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Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2005-11-30 18:41 UTC by Gernot Hillier
Modified: 2005-12-01 17:39 UTC (History)
0 users

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Found By: Beta-Customer
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Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: ---
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Description Gernot Hillier 2005-11-30 18:41:55 UTC 
After some hours of hunting the bug why neither the "grubonce" tool nor "savedefault" nor "default saved" in menu.lst work, I finally found that YaST seems to install grub "wrong" (?).

The problem seems to be caused by a "defective" /boot/grub/stage2.

After I issue the command "grub-install" which recreates /boot/grub/stage2, everything seems to work perfectly.
Comment 1 Gernot Hillier 2005-11-30 18:57:59 UTC 
I'm not sure any more about my idea of a "defective" stage2. This is the only difference between the stage2 installed by YaST (.sic) and the one installed by "grub-install":

--- /boot/stage2.sic.dump       2005-11-30 19:29:15.000000000 +0100
+++ /boot/stage2.dump   2005-11-30 19:29:21.000000000 +0100
@@ -22,8 +22,8 @@
 *
 000001f0  80 ec b1 01 66 00 00 14  19 ec b1 01 5f 00 20 08  |....f......._. .|
 00000200  ea 70 82 00 00 00 03 02  ff ff ff 00 00 00 00 00  |.p..............|
-00000210  00 00 30 2e 39 36 00 28  68 64 31 2c 31 29 2f 62  |..0.96.(hd1,1)/b|
-00000220  6f 6f 74 2f 67 72 75 62  2f 6d 65 6e 75 2e 6c 73  |oot/grub/menu.ls|
+00000210  00 00 30 2e 39 36 00 2f  62 6f 6f 74 2f 67 72 75  |..0.96./boot/gru|
+00000220  62 2f 6d 65 6e 75 2e 6c  73 74 00 6e 75 2e 6c 73  |b/menu.lst.nu.ls|
 00000230  74 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |t...............|
 00000240  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|

I'm not sure if this causes the problem as I'm quite unsure about how to debug GRUB correctly.

However, I could reproduce the same problem easily on three machines - two were updated from 9.x, while one was freshly installed. So I hope that this is a general problem reproducible on any machine easily...
Comment 2 Gernot Hillier 2005-11-30 19:02:02 UTC 
Sorry for the 3rd comment in a row, but to make at least the test case more clear:

* install a machine with SuLi 10.0 with a default install with YaST2
* Issue something like "grubonce 2" (i.e. memtest)
* Reboot. You should see that memtest is not invoked automatically
* Issue "grub-install"
* Reboot. You will see that memtest is invoked w/o the GRUB menu being displayed
* Reboot. The GRUB menu should appear again.
Comment 3 Gernot Hillier 2005-11-30 19:03:06 UTC 
Argh, SORRY. 

After doing "grub-install", you have to do "grubonce 2" again as grub-install will overwrite /boot/grub/default.
Comment 4 Torsten Duwe 2005-12-01 12:30:58 UTC 
Not with grub 0.97 any more. But I'm afraid You're chasing phantoms, the diff in question affects only the menu.lst file's position. Without the device specifier it may not be found, so Yast's way is safer, nothing more. You may see a side effect, related to Bug #115910.

Nevertheless thanks for your investigations so far.
Comment 5 Torsten Duwe 2005-12-01 17:39:09 UTC 
The underlying problem should be fixed with grub-0.97-3