Bug#708123: [grub-pc] grub2 (2.00-14) fails to install on RAID arrays (rescue, boot is broken)

[Colin Watson]

Control: retitle -1 [grub-pc] grub2 (2.00-14) fails to install on RAID arrays (rescue, boot is broken)
Control: severity -1 important
Control: tag -1 unreproducible

On Sat, Dec 21, 2013 at 01:00:10PM -0500, Michael Gilbert wrote:
> control: retitle -1 add news item about end-of-life for old RAID format
> 
> On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 1:27 PM, Gleb Golubitsky wrote:
> > On Friday, December 06, 2013 12:28:40 PM Colin Watson wrote:
> >> Gleb, if you can still reproduce this, could you please run this command
> >
> > I recently reinstalled my Debian (moved i386 -> amd64) and the bug is not
> > reproduced any more. Right before that i found out that 'delay' parameter
> > helped me so i suppose the key of problem here is a long time needed by kernel
> > (or somewhat else?) to detect my RAID.
> >
> > Dunno, maybe the bug should be closed as unreproducible.
> 
> This is an issue only with RAID arrays using a very old format, which
> it looks like grub now no longer supports.  This, I think, can be
> corrected by writing a news entry about that so users will see the
> info during an upgrade.

No, I do not believe it is intentional that GRUB no longer supports this
old format; furthermore, as I said in message #20 on this bug, a simple
test with the 0.90 format works fine for me.  Thus, not only do we not
know exactly what we would write in such a NEWS entry, but it would
probably be an inappropriate fix anyway.

While I agree that this is a pretty nasty bug if you encounter it, I
really need a way to reproduce this in order to fix it; ideally I'd be
able to reproduce it in an emulated system so that I can iterate fixes
quickly.  Perhaps somebody who hasn't made the bug go away on their
system could help with this?  In the meantime, I don't think it's any
more release-critical than any other isolated problem with the boot
loader, so I'm downgrading for now to allow 2.00 into testing as on the
whole it should be a very significant improvement over 1.99.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]