On Mon, 2012-02-13 at 19:25 -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:
>
> On Feb 13, 2012, at 7:10 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 2012-02-13 at 14:25 -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:
> >>
> >> I think the problem is GRUB2's own install script/app, doesn't do a great
> >> job of accounting for disks partitioned where the 1st partition comes less
> >> than 35KB after the MBR, and as the core.img is too large it fails to
> >> install between the MBR and partition 1.
> >>
> >> Strangely though, anaconda manages to get it to install without a
> >> complaint.
> >
> > No, that's clearly not the problem here, because this thread is about
> > installing grub to the front of a partition - *not* to the MBR.
>
> The GRUB2 manually doesn't outright say "unsupported" or "not
> recommended" but it does say insertion prior to the 1st partition is
> what's recommended. I've had zero problems with GRUB legacy installing
> into specific partitions, but worse than 50% failure with GRUB2 so
> I've given up on stuffing it into specific partitions.
>
>
> > anaconda only calls grub2-install, with appropriate parameters, to
> > install grub. It doesn't do anything particularly special or clever.
>
> Well I've got a number of cases on F16 where anaconda's call to
> grub2-install produces a smaller core.img than calling grub2-install
> directly. I don't have an explanation for this, but it's just enough
> of a difference in size that it causes problems with older
> partitioning schemes that start partition 1 at sector 63.
>
> Is anaconda passing --force by default?
When installing to a partition not to the MBR, yeah, it does.
It's easy enough to look at anaconda's actual code for all this. It's in
pyanaconda/bootloader.py . Here it is in all its glory:
def install(self):
# XXX will installing to multiple drives work as expected with GRUBv2?
for (stage1dev, stage2dev) in self.install_targets:
args = ["--no-floppy", self.grub_device_name(stage1dev)]
if stage1dev == stage2dev:
# This is hopefully a temporary hack. GRUB2 currently refuses
# to install to a partition's boot block without --force.
args.insert(0, '--force')
rc = iutil.execWithRedirect("grub2-install", args,
stdout="/dev/tty5", stderr="/dev/tty5",
root=ROOT_PATH)
if rc:
raise BootLoaderError("bootloader install failed")
I suppose the --no-floppy may make it a tad bit smaller. You could try
that on your manual invocations.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net
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