upgrade-reports: Wheezy -> Jessie: machine becomes unbootable due to missing Grub

[Niels Thykier]

Control: tags -1 -d-i

On Sat, 17 Jan 2015 11:04:51 +0100 Toni Mueller <support at oeko.net> wrote:
> Package: upgrade-reports
> Severity: critical
> Tags: d-i
> Justification: breaks the whole system
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 

Hi,

Thanks for reporting this bug.

I am CC'ing the grub2 maintainers, hoping one of them might shed some
light on this situation/problem.

~Niels

> I recently upgraded a server (amd64) from Squeeze to Wheezy, and from
> there to Jessie. The upgrade from Squeeze to Wheezy went fine, but after
> upgrading to Jessie, the machine would not boot anymore, spewing some
> messages about something not found on the screen before dropping into
> the grub shell. It turned out that the new version of Grub had not been
> installed on the drives, but the old version had been deleted already.
> 
> I first tried to resurrect the situation using the rescue mode of the
> d-i CD to re-install Grub on the drive(s), but that failed on all
> devices. I had to pop in a rescue CD (Finnix in my case) to mount all
> partitions in order, chroot to the real system, then
> 
> # grub-install /dev/sda
> # grub-install /dev/sdb
> # grub-install /dev/md0
> 
> After that, the machine came back up properly.
> 
> The machine has the following partitioning scheme:
> 
> /dev/md/0 -> /boot
> /dev/md/1 -> LVM PV
> 
> Inside the PV, I have /root , swap etc.pp.
> 
> It might have been the case that re-installing Grub failed because I
> changed the mdadm configuration as instructed in the Squeeze->Wheezy
> upgrade notes from
> 
> ARRAY /dev/md/0 something
> ARRAY /dev/md/1 something
> 
> to
> 
> ARRAY /dev/md0 something
> ARRAY /dev/md1 something
> 
> (after doing the suggested checks, as instructed).
> 
> I changed that back to
> 
> ARRAY /dev/md/0 something
> ARRAY /dev/md/1 something
> 
> I think I did that before doing the grub-install dance, but after that,
> the machine came back online just fine.
> 
> 
> HTH,
> --Toni++
> 
>