Bug#557992: grub-pc: Booting is completely broken

[Felix Zielcke]

Am Sonntag, den 29.11.2009, 20:49 +0100 schrieb Paul Seelig:
> On 11/29/2009 09:08 AM, Felix Zielcke wrote:
> > In the 24-1 one there was a syntax error in it which completely
> broke
> > our parser. But unfortunately nobody thought that the grub.cfg could
> be
> > just wrong and not the C code in GRUB itself.
> > 
> After having successfully rebooted today with 24-2, i took a security
> copy of the properly working grub.cfg, and installed 25-1, making sure
> that grub.cfg is updated. After that i compared both with each other,
> and there was not a single difference.
> 
> > We have already a debconf prompt for this. But it seems that people
> > either don't see it or just don't care about it etc.
> > 
> Hmmm, so maybe here we have the issue? If running grub-install again
> is
> definitely required for a workable boot configuration, then this might
> be the point where it fails. I never saw any debconf prompt, and thus
> didn't recognize the need to run grub-install. I have had configured
> debconf to never ask me any questions with a priority less than
> medium.
> But even after setting it to the lowest possible option i was not
> shown
> any prompt asking to run grub-install.
> 
> What i did now was to manually run grub-install on the drive, in order
> to make sure that grub is definitely updated. And this finally
> resulted
> in a properly bootable system.
> 
> Thanks for your help!

If grub.cfg is identical and the postinst doestn't run grub-install,
then the only thing in /boot/grub which changes between 1115-1 (= 24-2)
and 25-1 is the font we use as source to generate GRUB's unifont.pf2 and
ascii.pf2

But if you only have ASCII chars in the menu entry names then it
shouldn't at all make a difference.

This shows if debconf thinks if you saw that prompt already or not
  echo FGET grub-pc/install_devices seen | debconf-communicate

`sudo dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc' hopefully shows it then.


But usually it's not needed. But in the past this revelead some already
fixed parser bugs or if new features get added they of course need an
update of GRUB itself to work.

> Cheers
> P. *8^)

-- 
Felix Zielcke
Proud Debian Maintainer and GNU GRUB developer