Bug#462701: 462701: grub: savedefault menu.lst option results in unbootable system

[Ross Boylan]

Could you explain a bit more what the problem is, and what the solution
is?  I have a reiser boot partition, and so am very interested.
However, I can't quite tell what the problem is (beyond "fails to
boot"--why does it fail to boot?), why the combination of reiser and
savedefault is particularly bad, or how to fix things if it is bad.

I assume savedefault causes a write to the disk, which could be
problematic if it wasn't unmounted cleanly.  But I would think that the
worst case would be that the write was lost.  Alternately, if grub just
can't handle dirty unmounts, I can't imagine what editing in the command
line could remedy the problem.

Although I think I've had some unclean shutdowns, I've so far been able
to boot with grub + reiserfs boot partition.  Since the boot partition
is on an LVM logical volume carved out of an encrypted physical volume
there are a couple layers of indirection; perhaps those protect from
this bug.

Thanks.
Ross