Bug#497791: Bug #497791, confirmation

[Felix Zielcke]

Am Montag, den 27.07.2009, 15:26 +0200 schrieb Adolf Winterer:
> Hi,
> 
> I can confirm the problem. This is the sequence that leads to the problem:
> 
> * Install Lenny 5.0.2
> This will automatically use grub2, the system is perfectly bootable.
> 
> * Add Squeeze to the sources.list
> After updating the package list the packages grub-common and grub-pc are shown 
> as updateable.
> 
> * Update grub-common and grub-pc
> During the update a requestor shows up in the terminal window of Synaptic 
> asking for the device to install grub into. Here it is /dev/sda3. The

You probable mean /dev/sda. We don't ask for partitions.

>  
> requestor pops up again, this time I only hit the enter key as there is only 
> one target to install to. The installation process continues then with no 
> apparent error.

If you get asked twice then this may be a bug in Synaptic. I never used
it.
I just installed now lenny in a vm, upgraded grub-pc and grub-common to
squeeze and selected /dev/sda and rebooted. Worked fine.
Then I did dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc to remove the selections of /dev/sda
and tried the same.
And it failed with unknown command initrd.
Replacing the root=UUID with root=/dev/sda1 didn't help.

Well anyway it's a bug we already fixed and that's why we implemented
the debconf prompt now.

Are you sure that /dev/sda was seletected the 2nd time you were asked?
Did you see the output of grub-install?
Maybe try dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc


> * Permanent solution
> Something is wrong with using UUIDs in connection with booting, because 
> uncommenting the according line in /etc/defaults/grub:
> GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true
> and running update-grub changes the file /boot/grub/grub.cfg. The line 
> with "search ... --fsuid ..." is still present, but the line with "linux ..." 
> has changed to reflect /dev/sda3 as boot device.
> 
> Therefore the presence of the line containing "search ..." or the length of 
> the line do not seem to be a problem, but using the UUID is.
> 

That's maybe for you a solution. But the real solution is to make sure
that grub-install gets run when the package gets upgraded, so you won't
be affected by other bugs in the parser etc.
For example there were now in the squeeze version a few parser bug
fixes, though they didn't affect the default generated config.

-- 
Felix Zielcke
Proud Debian Maintainer