Well I finally found the problem why linux would not boot: for some reason grub is assigning (hd0) to /dev/sdb. The latter is where I've installed LFS. So in grub.cfg I changed "set root=(hd1,1)" to "set root=(hd0,1)". Following the syntax in the grub.cfg in Fedora19's installation on /dev/sda, I found that "set root='hd0,msdos1'" also works. When I changed this and rebooted, linux came up. Whew!
I found this by following the suggestions of Pierre, Fernando and Ken, and doing some careful detective work. I didn't realize until a little while ago that there was something radically inconsistent with the way the grub shell listed the hard disks: ls => (hd0) (hd0,msdos6) (hd0,msdos5) (hd0,msdos3) (hd0,msdos2) (hd0,msdos1) (hd1) (hd1,msdos2) (hd1,msdos1) (hd2) I looked carefully at the overall disk layout using lsblk, blkid, fdisk and gdisk. By comparing the outputs of these programs with the above output of ls, I realized that grub is swapping the positions of /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, such that /dev/sda -> (hd1) and /dev/sdb -> (hd0). I also discovered that fdisk is apparently doing something similar. Here, lsblk shows what corresponds to the physical location of the disks in terms of what SATA ports they're plugged into: root [ / ]# lsblk ################# NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT sda 8:0 0 1.8T 0 disk +-sda1 8:1 0 500M 0 part +-sda2 8:2 0 1.8T 0 part +-fedora-root 253:0 0 50G 0 lvm /fedoraroot +-fedora-swap 253:1 0 7.7G 0 lvm [SWAP] +-fedora-home 253:5 0 1.8T 0 lvm /fedorahome sdb 8:16 0 1.8T 0 disk +-sdb1 8:17 0 1G 0 part /boot +-sdb2 8:18 0 16G 0 part [SWAP] +-sdb3 8:19 0 100G 0 part / +-sdb4 8:20 0 1K 0 part +-sdb5 8:21 0 200G 0 part /home +-sdb6 8:22 0 195G 0 part /opt sdc 8:32 0 1.8T 0 disk +-sdc1 8:33 0 1G 0 part +-sdc2 8:34 0 500G 0 part +-vglfs-swap 253:2 0 16G 0 lvm +-vglfs-root 253:3 0 100G 0 lvm /lfsefiroot +-vglfs-home 253:4 0 384G 0 lvm /lfsefihome sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom ################# Here, blkid shows some crucially useful information about UUID's that helped me track down what was going wrong: root [ / ]# blkid ################# /dev/sda1: UUID="db51dd77-f71f-4319-b439-e13926388f1b" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="000a5524-01" /dev/sda2: UUID="exid3g-e84U-w93k-g6tR-1qYk-dgHd-uY6uYf" TYPE="LVM2_member" PARTUUID="000a5524-02" /dev/sdb1: UUID="e6edb5f1-1e29-4538-b0bf-4d00337dc07a" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="e185ae78-01" /dev/sdb2: UUID="9b7f161e-cf91-4a76-9286-25251a07eeaf" TYPE="swap" PARTUUID="e185ae78-02" /dev/sdb3: UUID="ec1ef083-8cac-49e4-be0d-4df9313c06be" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="e185ae78-03" /dev/sdb5: UUID="c6731536-1c77-490f-af78-306610ac10c7" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="e185ae78-05" /dev/sdb6: UUID="df780b67-3e9f-4f28-9118-23242d43109e" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="e185ae78-06" /dev/mapper/fedora-root: UUID="216a3b57-308b-40d1-9fb4-dc4bfb00e652" TYPE="ext4" /dev/mapper/fedora-swap: UUID="76bfd777-3fe9-4d43-b7b3-d474769a2e73" TYPE="swap" /dev/mapper/fedora-home: UUID="766d3abc-9598-4948-b541-a767d21b5f1e" TYPE="ext4" /dev/sdc1: UUID="A12D-1A6F" TYPE="vfat" PARTLABEL="EFI System" PARTUUID="f000e2e8-a452-4553-a939-5edddc4cbbc7" /dev/sdc2: UUID="DEig5C-AQxo-ncwd-Xd1p-MKAv-LtAe-3fhM2Y" TYPE="LVM2_member" PARTLABEL="Linux LVM" PARTUUID="1505ae6f-a4ef-41bc-a9a8-ff8c20fb2854" /dev/mapper/vglfs-swap: UUID="7b173603-96fb-49ba-a582-2294c38745cd" TYPE="swap" /dev/mapper/vglfs-root: UUID="2cb0acca-841d-4164-817b-b20e6584ac84" TYPE="ext4" /dev/mapper/vglfs-home: UUID="1b70c23a-48a3-4410-b6d0-ac1744e682ee" TYPE="ext4 ################# The following partial output from fdisk shows that fdisk is listing the disks in the same order in which grub is assigning the (hdX) numbers. Note that the number of partitions for each disk (5, 2 and 2 (minus the Extended partition on /dev/sdb4)) and their partition numbers and their order corresponds to the grub shell's output: root [ / ]# fdisk -l ################# Disk /dev/sdb: 1.8 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors ... Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 2048 2099199 1048576 83 Linux /dev/sdb2 2099200 35653631 16777216 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sdb3 35653632 245368831 104857600 83 Linux /dev/sdb4 245368832 1084229631 419430400 5 Extended /dev/sdb5 245370880 664801279 209715200 83 Linux /dev/sdb6 664803328 1073747967 204472320 83 Linux Disk /dev/sda: 1.8 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors ... Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 2048 1026047 512000 83 Linux /dev/sda2 1026048 3907028991 1953001472 8e Linux LVM Disk /dev/sdc: 1.8 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors ... Disklabel type: gpt Disk identifier: 53BC10EE-39CD-4B83-AB30-1DC63DF7E35C Device Start End Size Type /dev/sdc1 2048 2099199 1G EFI System /dev/sdc2 2099200 1050675199 500G Linux LVM ################# After recording the above listings I listed the partitions in the grub shell like this: ls (hd0,msdos1) => Partition hd0,msdos1: Filesystem type ext* ... UUID e6edb5f1... Partition start at 2048 ... ls (hd0,msdos2) => ... ... I saw that the UUID's and the "Partition start at" numbers all corresponded to /dev/sdb as listed by blkid. So that was the smoking gun that grub is swapping the drive designations. I hope the above proves useful to others in a similar predicament. Now, does anyone have a clue as to why both grub and fdisk are swapping the disk numbers? Alan -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
