I have an old server with five hard drives, some of which are SATA other Ultra IDE. The machine has two controllers. One is the primary controller where a SATA drive is clearly flagged as the primary boot device. The other four drives (two SATA, two Ultra IDE) are on the other controller, connected in a RAID5 (/dev/md0).
I had some problems installing Hardy Beta on this machine when my manual partitioning efforts wrote GRUB to a partition which the machine would not boot from (I have not yet determined whether I consider this a bug or operator error), but it is unrelated to the bug I am commenting on here. Suffice it to say that as part of fixing this problem I discovered that menu.lst contained a reference to a root partition on (hd4,1). The correct reference would be (hd0,1). Note that I do not know whether this faulty menu.lst was created as part of the installation process or the subsequent dist-upgrade. So let me get to the point. This morning I was notified that there were several updates to Hardy Beta. As part of installing these updates I was alerted that debconf wanted to replace my menu.lst and asked me whether I wanted to keep the installed version or replace it with the package maintainers version. I opted for the latter but decided to investigate. It turned out that the root reference had been changed back to (hd4,1). As I am not a very experienced grub admin I decided to check what grub considered the right partition. So I entered the grub shell and gave the command "find /boot/grub/stage1" and got the response (hd0,1). So I changed menu.lst, leaving both choices: title Ubuntu hardy (development branch), kernel 2.6.24-16-generic root (hd0,1) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-generic root=UUID=46a05d8c-6d30-4176-88c6-2c4a829de775 ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-16-generic quiet and title Ubuntu hardy (development branch), kernel 2.6.24-16-generic root (hd4,1) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-generic root=UUID=46a05d8c-6d30-4176-88c6-2c4a829de775 ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-16-generic quiet When I booted the machine, I found that it would only boot from the (hd0,1) option, as expected. In other words, the update would have left my machine in an unbootable state. I believe this is the topic of this bug and I offer my assistance in tracking this down with experiments like these. I should add an observation, in case it matters. I have noticed strange SCSI id assignments on this machine. Sometimes the disk which I consider the primary disk is labeled /dev/sda and sometimes it is labeled /dev/sde. This seems to be totally random and can change on two subsequent boots. This does not seem to bother anything (I worried that mdadm might be thrown for a loop) but the UUID system seems to take care of this (I wish I understood how). I mention this because this /dev/sda vs. /dev/sde confusion smells a lot like a (hd0) vs. (hd4) confusion. Hope this helps. Gisli PS: I have taken the liberty of adding "(and dist-upgrade)" to the Subject:, which I hope is not a launchpad faux pas. -- upon installation the GRUB menu.lst file is generated wrong https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/127946 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
