On Fri, November 7, 2008 1:21 pm, Will Woods wrote:
On Fri, 2008-11-07 at 17:40 +0000, Camilo Mesias wrote:
A quick update on this. I successfully upgraded one machine about a week ago, so I tried another machine today and it had a problem booting during the install. ...
... As far as we've been able to trace it, *something* causes GRUB stage2 (or stage 1.5) to move its physical on-disk location. But we don't know what. Nothing that we're doing to GRUB *should* cause that. But something does, and then stage1 can't find the rest of GRUB, and we get stuck with "GRUB" on-screen and an unbootable system.
Anyway. I've spent *weeks* trying to track that one down, bugging pjones (our GRUB maintainer) and esandeen (our mad ext3/ext4 hacker) endlessly, and never made any real progress. Reinstalling GRUB, as you did, is the proper fix when this happens. But we still don't know what causes it, and therefore how to keep it from happening in the first place.
Can preupgrade just re-install grub itself at some suitable point. It seems that'd work around the issue...