Bug#542165: grub-common: grub-probe kind of mishandles dm-crypt partitions

[Colin Watson]

tags 542165 pending
thanks

On Sat, Jun 05, 2010 at 01:10:46AM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
> The attached patch detects the situation, prints a warning and avoids
> the problematic code parts. This allows package update and
> configuration generation to finish and makes the local admin aware
> that he needs to manually intervene.
> 
> In the absence of a grub-probe which correctly handles encrypted
> partitions, this works around the issue by not aborting.

Thanks.  I'm not 100% comfortable with this kind of approach because I'm
concerned that the result may be some admins not noticing that their
system isn't bootable, but it does seem to be better than the current
rather brute-force option for now.  I made a few modifications to your
patch to avoid emitting errors if dmsetup isn't installed, to use
grub_warn, and to expand on the language in the warning message a little bit,
but have otherwise gone ahead and applied it for the next upload.

For people redirected to this bug report by the warning message,
/etc/grub.d/01_modules might need to look something like this:


#!/bin/sh
exec tail -n +3 $0
# List GRUB module names after this comment, with 'insmod' before each
# one.  For instance, to ensure that GRUB can read MS-DOS partition
# tables, use 'insmod part_msdos', and to ensure that it can read
# ext[234] file systems, use 'insmod ext2' (without the quotes).  Be
# careful not to change the 'exec tail' line above.


Of course, if you aren't in this sort of strange situation where you
need to make special arrangements for /boot to work, none of this should
be necessary.

Regards,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]