Bug#584540: grub-pc: savedefault not working (grubenv not updating?)

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Jun 04, 2010 at 10:59:25PM +1000, Tim Richardson wrote:
> To the best of my ability I have configured /etc/default/grub for
> savedefault functionality.
> But it's not working.
> I note that /boot/grub/grubenv has a modified date of May 25 and that
> if I move this file, a new one is not created in its place, which is
> not what I expected.

/boot/grub/grubenv exists to reserve a small chunk of disk space so that
GRUB can write to it.  GRUB doesn't have a full writing filesystem
implementation, so it doesn't update modification times when it writes,
and it's entirely unable to create new files at boot time.
'grub-editenv /boot/grub/grubenv create' will create the block.

> When I say it's not working, I mean that grub-pc always defaults to
> the first entry in my list, regardless of whether I most recently
> booted into Windows.

Could you post the file /boot/grub/grubenv, preferably as an
*attachment* since it is not plain text?

Is anything else fancy going on?  For instance, are you using LVM or
RAID?  How far is /boot/grub/grubenv into the disk?

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]