GRUB problem with 11.[34] ?

nurmi_e · July 9, 2011, 2:13pm

I had 11.1 for a long time and really needed to upgrade. However all attempts to upgrade/install from scratch 11.4 version in all variants ( different desktops, text mode, network install, DVD, etc ) resulted in the same: after looking just fine, configure, install, etc … reboot, everything seems to be normal. However, when I reboot it manually it fails miserably: “Missing operating system” ! Funny enough with 11.3 was the same. I have a suspicion that something is wrong with GRUB configuration but during installation there were no messages on that. I have rather old BIOS, could it be the reason, as 11.4 uses “device-by-name” in menu.lst ? I can also add that HD is SATA if it matters, however in 11.1 it worked fine. Any advice on at least the ways to diagnose the problem will be appreciated.

please_try_again · July 9, 2011, 2:19pm

Do you have more than 1 HD?

user · July 9, 2011, 6:39pm

please try again wrote:

>
> Do you have more than 1 HD?

Excellent question - I ran into this updating an 11.1 installation where the
fstab/grub entries in the original 11.1 all referred to sda/sdb/etc. The
basic problem was that when 11.4 came out the enumeration of the hard drives
got somewhat FUBAR - my second drive became sdf on one machine and the two
drives were in reverse order on another. The quick and dirty fix was to
edit the original menu.lst and fstab to use only the device by id notation
after which all went smoothly. The BIOS enumeration and the os enumeration
no longer matched.

–
WHonea

please_try_again · July 10, 2011, 1:26am

Excellent response. But this is not a quick and dirty fix. This is simply the only way to do it . Never use device names anywhere! Modern setups don’t. They use either UUIDs, or /dev/disk/by-id or by-uuid symlinks. There might be problems indeed while updating an older system if the setup doesn’t replace the device names in Grub and /etc/fstab with UUIDs or any other consistent notation and the device names appear to have changed … The topic has been widely discussed in many posts.
How to boot the MBR of an secondary disk with GRUB? - Page 4

nurmi_e · July 10, 2011, 4:15am

No, I have just one HD.

please_try_again · July 10, 2011, 5:55am

All right. Now I would suggest you boot from a live CD, open a root terminal (or type su -l as the first command) and go to the forum with Firefox. If you connect through dhcp you should get online from Live CD. In the terminal, type this command and copy/paste the output:

fdisk -l

Try to find out the device name of your root partition from fdisk output. It should not be very difficult. Assuming it is sda1 (just an example), mount it with:

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

Then show us your /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst, as well as /boot/grub/device.map and wait for advice:

cat /mnt/etc/fstab
cat /mnt/boot/grub/menu.lst
cat /mnt/boot/grub/device.map

Notice that this assumes that you don’t have /boot on a separate partition!

nurmi_e · July 10, 2011, 10:10am

This is what I picked out of the system before crashed next time on boot. Really looks stange.
And I have /boot on a separate partition part1 or sda2. Also during install phase it shows initial disk partition completely screwed from what it was confirured. Could it be disk size factor ? It is SATA, BTW.

/boot/grub/device.map:

(hd0) /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3120811AS_3PT05TA9

fstab:

UUID=26aed4b2-7108-430a-8751-d6d496f7b520 / ext4 acl,user_xattr 1 1
UUID=1ffbeaab-1b10-4e9e-b36b-c318c5349c7f /boot ext4 acl,user_xattr 1 2
UUID=56325767-c922-41d6-afdc-fcf910d5a3ee /tmp ext4 acl,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3120811AS_3PT05TA9-part1 swap swap defaults 0 0

/boot/grub/menu.lst:

Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Sun Jul 10 18:20:37 VLAST 2011

THIS FILE WILL BE PARTIALLY OVERWRITTEN by perl-Bootloader

Configure custom boot parameters for updated kernels in /etc/sysconfig/bootloader

default 0
timeout 8
gfxmenu (hd0,1)/message
##YaST - activate

###Don’t change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title Desktop – openSUSE 11.3 - 2.6.34-12
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.34-12-desktop root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/26aed4b2-7108-430a-8751-d6d496f7b520 resume=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3120811AS_3PT05TA9-part1 splash=silent quiet showopts vga=0x31a
initrd /initrd-2.6.34-12-desktop

please_try_again · July 10, 2011, 6:36pm

Allow me to put that in CODE tags first so that we can read it.

/boot/grub/device.map:
======================

(hd0)   /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3120811AS_3PT05TA9

fstab:
======

UUID=26aed4b2-7108-430a-8751-d6d496f7b520 /                    ext4       acl,user_xattr        1 1
UUID=1ffbeaab-1b10-4e9e-b36b-c318c5349c7f /boot                ext4       acl,user_xattr        1 2
UUID=56325767-c922-41d6-afdc-fcf910d5a3ee /tmp                 ext4       acl,user_xattr        1 2
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3120811AS_3PT05TA9-part1 swap                 swap       defaults              0 0

/boot/grub/menu.lst:
====================

# Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Sun Jul 10 18:20:37 VLAST 2011
# THIS FILE WILL BE PARTIALLY OVERWRITTEN by perl-Bootloader
# Configure custom boot parameters for updated kernels in /etc/sysconfig/bootloader

default 0
timeout 8
gfxmenu (hd0,1)/message
##YaST - activate

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title Desktop -- openSUSE 11.3 - 2.6.34-12
    root (hd0,1)
    kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.34-12-desktop root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/26aed4b2-7108-430a-8751-d6d496f7b520 resume=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3120811AS_3PT05TA9-part1 splash=silent quiet showopts vga=0x31a
    initrd /initrd-2.6.34-12-desktop

But we still need the output of

fdisk -l

This is a lowercase L, not the number 1.
Please use CODE tags [noparse]

...

[/noparse] for the output of such commands.