On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 09:31:16AM +0200, Svante Signell wrote: > I should have posted to help-grub, but I am not subscribed to that list, > only grub-devel. > > Can somebody please help me with the following problem: > (I have asked on Debian lists, and also filed a bug #594158 but no > response so far). > > When installing a new kernel or a new version of grub I get a warning > that /dev/sda1 (windows rescue) and /dev/sda3 (linux root /) are > improperly nested: /usr/sbin/grub-probe: warn: Discarding improperly nested > partition > (hd1,msdos3,msdos1). > > What does improperly nested mean: overlapping, or something else? > > How to resolve this problem? According to fdisk the sda1 and sda3 partitions > are _not_ overlapping: > Additionally, does the same warning have to be repeated so many times for > every kernel entry???
It did not say they overlapped. It said it found a partition table inside sda3 which is improper given it is not an extended partition (sda4 is). > #> fdisk -l /dev/sda > > Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes > 240 heads, 63 sectors/track, 20673 cylinders > Units = cylinders of 15120 * 512 = 7741440 bytes > Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes > I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes > Disk identifier: 0xd568d568 > > Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System > /dev/sda1 1 501 3787528+ 1b Hidden W95 FAT32 > /dev/sda2 * 502 15254 111532680 7 HPFS/NTFS > /dev/sda3 15255 15512 1950480 83 Linux > /dev/sda4 15513 20673 39017160 f W95 Ext'd (LBA) > /dev/sda5 15513 15930 3160048+ 83 Linux > /dev/sda6 15931 17320 10508368+ 83 Linux > /dev/sda7 17321 20530 24267568+ 83 Linux > /dev/sda8 20531 20673 1081048+ 82 Linux swap/Solaris Is there any chance you used to have an extended partition as sda3 and then made a linux partition which is now sda3 and your new extended partition is sda4? If so, then there is a chance that the first sector of sda3 contains the old extended partition table, and grub probe might be detecting that. One way to check would be to do: dd if=/dev/sda3 of=/tmp/sda3.mbr bs=512 count=1 Then run 'file /tmp/sda3.mbr'. If it says partition table, then I think you have found your problem. If that is what is happening, then it is a question of whether grub-probe made a mistake when it scanned for partitions in something not marked as a valid place to look for partitions. Of course the quick workaround in that case is to clear that sector (assuming the filesystem doesn't use the first sector of the partition, which many filesystems avoid since it is a handy place for boot loaders and such). If the filesystem does avoid that part of the partition, that would be a good reason an old extended partition table would have survived creating a filesystem. -- Len Sorensen _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
