Bug#393079: update-grub: savedefault can cause problems

[Peter Cordes]

Package: grub
Version: 0.97-1ubuntu9
Severity: normal


 (CC'ing Debian BTS, because I would have had the same problem with Sarge
instead of Dapper.  Ubuntu's reportbug doesn't handle this very well...)

 I have a system using dmraid and booting grub from the Windows boot loader.
Using savedefault prevents grub from booting Linux.  Selecting the menu
entry for the Ubuntu kernel, the "kernel" and "initrd" lines show, but then
I see:
....
savedefault

Error 15: File not found

 and I have to press return to go back to the main grub menu.  If I hit 'e'
and take out the savedefault, it boots normally.

 The menu.lst entry wass generated by update-grub:
title		Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.15-27-k7
root		(hd0,6)
kernel		/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-27-k7 root=/dev/mapper/via_hibggiii7 ro quiet splash
initrd		/boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-27-k7
savedefault
boot

 As I said, this machine doesn't boot grub the normal way.  The machine is
an Athlon XP on an Asus A7V600, with 2 160GB SATA hard drives using
BIOS-driven RAID1.  It runs win2k, but I left 5GB at the end of the drives
to play around with; hence Ubuntu.  I installed mostly using
http://www.ubuntu-in.org/wiki/SATA_RAID_Howto.  (which, incidentally, is a
real pain compared to setting up /target and using the normal ubiquity
installer...)  

 I put GRUB on the boot sector of my ext3 partition, not the MBR, using 
grub
device (hd0) /dev/mapper/via_hibggiii
root (hd0,6)
setup (hd0,6)

 And then, instead of somehow chainloading that partition, I did 
dd if=/dev/mapper/via_hibggiii of=grub.img bs=512 count=1
and after booting into win2k I copied that file to c:\grub.img, and told the
windows bootloader about it with boot.ini:
....
c:\grub.img="GRUB"

 So I don't know where grub could save defaults to, and I'm not shocked that
savedefault doesn't work.  I've always been suspicious about by default
writing to the hard drive while booting, but this is the first time
savedefault has ever actually caused a problem.  My opinion is that it's not
such a great default.  The standard grub menu.lst doesn't use the saved
default anyway.  I would suggest making savedefault another
automagic-comment configurable item, defaulting to off.

 Thanks,
Peter Cordes

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers dapper-security
  APT policy: (500, 'dapper-security'), (500, 'dapper')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.15-27-k7
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968)

Versions of packages grub depends on:
ii  libc6                    2.3.6-0ubuntu20 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii  libncurses5              5.5-1ubuntu3    Shared libraries for terminal hand

grub recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information