[SOLVED] Verne and GRUB1.9

[sea]

Heyas

After quite a few days with a stable impression, i had to erease my harddisk, as nothing wanted to boot any more
I did use the same F16 BetaRC2 LXDE spin 64bit.

What went wrong:
Had F15 installed on partitions.
Installed F16 on other partitions.

Both were running fine for a few days, after updating (f16: yum upgrade // f15: yum update) and installing another linux to some other partitions (didnt let it get its hands on /boot) i tried to login to f16.

That was my last f16 login until reinstall.
However, i was in f16, running "grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg" i had not only the 3 OS listed i had installed, but like 16 entries out of 3 OS. Yea sure, all kernels were listed. But i had f15 2.6.40.4.5 listed like 3 times (the corresponding recovery mode not counted)

However, since that, i wernt able to login/boot in any of the installed os.
I give it another shoot, to play a bit with grub2 and shall share the experiences later again.

[smr54]

I found after a few updates, that SELinux was stopping things from booting. The original install booted without problem, a few updates later, I was getting all sorts of access denied messages. At that point, I disabled SELinux and it booted again. As it's a machine where I don't need SELinux, I left it at that.

You can try adding enforce=0 on boot and seeing if that works, assuming you run into the same issue again.

In early betas, I always disable rhgb quiet, in grub2, by editing /etc/default/grub and then running grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg, so I can see what the problem is.

[sea]

Issue is, it didnt cause errors, it just stoped.
Without quiet rhb, i couldnt enter a pw for the encrypted hd, so i was always getting the timeout error.

Below just another error during hd preparation:

[DBelton]

in your original post above you said you ran grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Did you run it as you typed, or is that a typo?

the correct (and what you should have run) is like smr54 had it in his post grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

(notice the grub2 directory instead of the grub directory under /boot.)

[sea]

I dont remember if i had the missing 2 or not.
Anyways, i've reinstalled it now the 2nd time, having as the only OS installed (remeber the erease of harddisk, by will).
Last time i could not boot it, it said isolinux.bin not found.

Now i installed again:
1 mb bios
499 /boot
rest /lvm_group

i was able to choose from sda and sda3, so i've chosen sda.

lets pray.

---------- Post added at 05:35 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:03 PM ----------
.. from f16 live media ...
Guess i could see the bios boot.. but not menu.
Wernt able to to get into the grub2 menu at all not even with pressed shift key.

Why is that 1 mb bios boot (stage 1) REQUIRED if its a first install, but not when 'adding' F16 to some existing installations?

---------- Post added at 06:10 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:35 PM ----------

Ok last try...
Logstyle: sda1 (1mbr), sda2(boot), sda3 (lvm)
installed bootloader on sda2

---------- Post added at 09:26 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:10 PM ----------

I give up.
My laptop doesnt like F16/Grub1.99 as of current state.
Even when tried to run it as single OS, with default settings it would not load at all after installation.

It forced me to make that 1mb bios boot partition, but wouldnt load afterwards.
I could not enter grub menu, not with shift, not with anything else, i got brought back to the hd/cd/usb selection of bios menu.

According to my experience, F16 is yet not ready to be installed as main OS.
I know its beta, but either way, even windoze beta were able to run after installation.

Note:
Testrun 1: Side-a-side installation (multiboot, grub2) works, with tweaking.
Testrun 2: Tries to install F16 as main: 10, none worked
Testrun 3: Side-a-side installation (multiboot, grub legacy) runs smoothly without problems.

[DBelton]

Only reason I can think that it required a 1MB BIOS partition is if you have EFI.

F16 and grub2 didn't require a 1MB partition here on my system

On my Windows XP drive, I have just 1 partition for Windows, with grub2 installed in the MBR.
My second drive I have Fedora, and have just have 4 partitions on that drive, boot, swap, / and home. (I set them up as separate partitions and not using LVM. Much easier that way)

/boot is sdb1 but grub2 is installed in the MBR on sda.

[sea]

Weird, i've never came by EFI.
Is there an easy way to check if i have EFI, and therefore really requiring that 1mb partition?

I've seen a screen i dont recall to have seen it with windoze.
It (that 1mb partition, booted) looked like a 'common bios screen'
However, it stoped loading after display some of intels chipset values.

[AdamW]

dbelton: it's the other way around. you need a BIOS boot partition if your system is *not* EFI.

It's only needed with the combination of BIOS and a gpt-labelled disk, which you'll only get if you cause anaconda to completely re-format a disk during installation (it gives newly formatted disks the gpt format disk label now).

[sea]

Ok, so assuming my bios is NOT efi, as i do require the 1mb boot partition according to anaconde.
Which of these do i select to be written after the changes to the hd-partitions (using lvm)

Most curious, i have a drop down the some bios data, but thats not selectable (just as in f15, idkw).
Any reason?

€dit:
Hmm, as even F15 works unstable for me atm, and arch obviously doesnt like lvm's, i'll give f16 another shot

---------- Post added at 07:21 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:34 PM ----------

the above is valid for installation while no other OS is installed..

the below is valid for installation while other OS' are installed...
Why the heck does F16 now DONT require a 1mb boot partition?
Because it recognizes that the others boot as well without it?

---------- Post added at 08:11 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:21 PM ----------

Ok weird, with F16 TC Beta RC2 it wouldnt load, with the nightly build 20110919 it loaded, finaly
Without the 1mb bios boot drive. curious...

[DBelton]

Interesting.

I have a GPT formatted disk and no EFI, but I didn't get the 1MB BIOS partition.

Disk /dev/sda: 586072368 sectors, 279.5 GiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 052DAAD8-581A-4742-8C76-91217DDA81E1
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 586072334
Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries
Total free space is 2285 sectors (1.1 MiB)

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1            2048         2099199   1024.0 MiB  EF00  ext4
   2         2099200        10356735   3.9 GiB     8200  
   3        10356736       115214335   50.0 GiB    0700  
   4       115214336       586072063   224.5 GiB   0700

partition 1 is /boot
partition 2 is swap
partition 3 is /
partition 4 is /home

It appears as though it made my /boot partition the EFI partition and didn't create an extra 1MB one.

The partitions were created with the anaconda installer when I installed F16

Here is what I get on another system here where the partitions were created by the F15 installer, and GPT formatted.

Disk /dev/sda: 156301488 sectors, 74.5 GiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 2FA3707F-C35C-48C2-A793-59CE9DF41B52
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 156301454
Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries
Total free space is 2157 sectors (1.1 MiB)

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1            2048         1050623   512.0 MiB   8300  Linux filesystem
   2         1050624        78276607   36.8 GiB    8300  Linux filesystem
   3        78276608       147912703   33.2 GiB    8300  Linux filesystem
   4       147912704       156301311   4.0 GiB     8200  Linux swap

I didn't even get the EFI partition type at all on this one. It has BIOS and not EFI.

What determines if it creates the EFI partition? And what determines if it creates an extra 1MB parttiion versus using one of the other partitions?

[AdamW]

dbelton: it can't 'use another partition'. The BIOS boot partition has to be of the specific 'BIOS boot' type which renders it useless for any other purpose.

I'm not sure where you see that your first case is GPT formatted; that looks like fdisk output, and fdisk doesn't really grok GPT labels. You have to use parted. parted output specifically states the disk label:

(parted) print
Model: ATA C300-CTFDDAC128M (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 128GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 1049kB 525MB 524MB primary ext4 boot
2 525MB 128GB 128GB primary lvm

if it were a gpt labelled disk, it'd say 'gpt' instead of 'msdos'.

Your second case is almost certainly not gpt-labelled. F15 would not give any disk a gpt disk label unless it was 2TB or larger in size.

In any case, check with parted to see what disk label each case really has.

[DBelton]

it is gdisk output, not fdisk. And I have been formatting all of my drives as GUID partition table for over a year now.

I create the GUID partition table, then run the Fedora installer.

[root@tower11 ~]# parted
GNU Parted 3.0
Using /dev/sda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print                                                            
Model: ATA ST3300831A (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 300GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt

Number  Start   End     Size    File system     Name  Flags
 1      1049kB  1075MB  1074MB  ext4            ext4  boot
 2      1075MB  5303MB  4228MB  linux-swap(v1)
 3      5303MB  59.0GB  53.7GB  ext4
 4      59.0GB  300GB   241GB   ext4

(parted)

And

[root@tower20 ~]# parted 
GNU Parted 2.3
Using /dev/sda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print                                                            
Model: ATA WDC WD800JD-60LS (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 80.0GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt

Number  Start   End     Size    File system     Name  Flags
 1      1049kB  538MB   537MB    ext4            ext4  boot
 2      538MB   40.1GB  39.5GB   ext4
 3      40.1GB  75.7GB  35.7GB   ext4
 4      75.7GB  80.0GB  4295MB  linux-swap(v1)

(parted)

[AdamW]

I'm not sure what pre-16.18 anaconda's behaviour would be with a disk that it wasn't formatting but which had a GPT disk label. post-16.18, if there's any free space on it, it'll put a BIOS boot partition on it.

F15 didn't have any particular code to deal with GPT, so it would likely just go ahead and install the bootloader wherever you asked. It's possibly the case that grub-legacy is small enough to fit into the MBR itself, and hence doesn't need a BIOS boot partition; technically a BIOS boot partition is only needed when the bootloader can't fit itself into the MBR, but I didn't want to complicate the issue any more than was necessary. grub2 is definitely large enough that it requires a BIOS boot partition.

Still, I'm a little intrigued as to how your first system can boot. Is the bootloader actually installed to the MBR of that GPT-labelled disk? Are you *sure* you boot via BIOS not EFI? Cos something doesn't quite seem to add up about that setup.

[sea]

Ha figured !

PHP Code:

Model: ATA TOSHIBA MK3265GS (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 320GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
 1      1049kB  525MB   524MB   primary  ext4         boot
 2      525MB   34.1GB  33.6GB  primary               lvm
 3      34.1GB  68.4GB  34.4GB  primary               lvm
 4      68.4GB  220GB   152GB   primary  ext4 


Watch closely, there IS a 1mb boot partition, its just not listed
Or why else does the /boot partition for both of us start at 1049kb

[DBelton]

I am certain it boots via BIOS and not EFI.

What I did was to create the GPT partition table, then let the F15 installer create the partitions and format them.

Same with the F16 install, I created the GPT partition table, and anaconda created the partitions and formatted them.

Grub is installed into the MBR on both the F15 and the F16 systems. (Grub legacy on F15, Grub2 on F16.)

On the F16 install, it did mark the /boot partition with the EFI partition type, then formatted it ext4 and put my kernels and all that crap in there. Is it possible that grub2 can use the /boot partition as the BIOS boot partition as well?

And sea, the partitions start at sector 1049 because that is how parted does things. It aligns the partitions on 2048 sector boundries. You can over-ride that if you want to, in case you want to align it better on 4096 byte physical sector drives.

Oh well, don't know if it is supposed to work or not, but it does