Hi Patrick, Of course, I'd rather try and avoid reinstalling the whole system. Creating a small boot partition seems a very sane thing to do, I'll certainly do that in the future.
I'll report back in 2-3 days with the result (the server is in production currently). Thanks you for your interest and ideas. Andras On Tue, 17 Jun 2014 07:52:32 -0700 "Patrick J. LoPresti" <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 1:25 AM, Andras Horvath <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > I'm having problem with the latest kernel version for some time now. The > > previous kernel version boots fine and everything works just well, but the > > latest kernel (v2.6.32-431.17.1.el6.x86_64) cannot boot and Grub says > > something like "trying to reach blocks outside of partition" and that's all > > the message there is and boot hangs. > > This sounds to me like your kernel has some blocks that lie beyond > what GRUB can read during boot (using the system BIOS). It worked > before because you got lucky; any time you reinstalled a kernel, you > were running the risk of some of the new boot image's blocks lying > outside the bootable range. > > If this is correct, checking the inode number will not help. because > the problem the blocks inside the file itself, not the inode. > > Possible fixes, in increasing order of difficulty: > > Copy the kernel and initrd images until you get lucky again > See if your system BIOS has a setting related to booting from large disks > Reinstall grub with the "--force-lba" option > Reinstall the system, using an EFI boot partition (have fun) > Reinstall the system, creating a small (<500M) /boot partition as the > first partition on the drive > > > That last is what I have done for years. I tried not doing so for my > last install on a large RAID -- figuring this is the 21st century -- > and my system failed to boot. I reinstalled with a small /boot > partition and now it consistently works fine across dozens of > reinstalls. I do not know whether this is due to a buggy RAID BIOS or > something else, and I do not care... > > Good luck. > > - Pat
