Bug 445900
Summary: | [Stratus 5.6 bug] grub gets confused and fails to boot if a USB drive is present when booting from a disk | ||
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Product: | Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 | Reporter: | Charlotte Richardson <charlotte.richardson> |
Component: | grub | Assignee: | Peter Jones <pjones> |
Status: | CLOSED WONTFIX | QA Contact: | |
Severity: | high | Docs Contact: | |
Priority: | high | ||
Version: | 5.4 | CC: | andriusb, atodorov, balkov, bzeranski, chas.horvath, cward, dcantrell, ddumas, jparadis, robert.evans |
Target Milestone: | rc | Keywords: | OtherQA, Reopened |
Target Release: | 5.6 | ||
Hardware: | x86_64 | ||
OS: | Linux | ||
Whiteboard: | |||
Fixed In Version: | Doc Type: | Bug Fix | |
Doc Text: | Story Points: | --- | |
Clone Of: | Environment: | ||
Last Closed: | 2010-08-09 19:59:26 UTC | Type: | --- |
Regression: | --- | Mount Type: | --- |
Documentation: | --- | CRM: | |
Verified Versions: | Category: | --- | |
oVirt Team: | --- | RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host: | |
Cloudforms Team: | --- | Target Upstream Version: | |
Embargoed: | |||
Bug Depends On: | |||
Bug Blocks: | 557597 |
Description
Charlotte Richardson
2008-05-09 18:23:55 UTC
We're not going to have time to get to this in 5.4 so I'm moving it to 5.5 (Hi Charlotte!) This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion, but this component is not scheduled to be updated in the current Red Hat Enterprise Linux release. If you would like this request to be reviewed for the next minor release, ask your support representative to set the next rhel-x.y flag to "?". I don't think this is a bug - when you install the bootloader, it is set up to use a specific drive based on the BIOS drive number (i.e. 0x80). If you add a device after that and BIOS re-enumerates the devices with the new device before the old one, that simply won't work. This appears to be either user error or a BIOS bug. I disagree, and would like to reopen this bug because we have still gotten complaints about it under RHEL5.4. Any system using grub for its boot-loader that I have tried this on behaves in the same way. Grub will get confused and the system will not boot if a USB thumb drive happens to be plugged in when the system is rebooted, even though the BIOS is set to boot from disk and the USB drive is not bootable. For example, it reproduces on an Intel S5500BC motherboard with two quad-core X5570 2.93GHz processor chips that I happen to have here, as well as various standard Dell platforms. If you happen to have left a USB thumb drive plugged in and the system needs to reboot for any reason, grub will get confused and the system will never boot up, until you physically go over to it and pull out the thumb drive. The BIOS is not involved. Grub starts running looking at the actual boot disk, gets confused, and then gets a "geometry error" looking at the USB drive instead of the boot disk. /Charlotte Reopening per Partner request. We are very late in the 5.5 dev cycle though. Escalating to RH mgmt. @Status We need to confirm that there is third-party commitment to test for the resolution of this request during the RHEL 5.5 Beta Test Phase before we can approve it for acceptance into the release. RHEL 5.5 Beta Test Phase is expected to begin around February 2010. In order to avoid any unnecessary delays, please post a confirmation as soon as possible, including the contact information for testing engineers. Any additional information about alternative testing variations we could use to reproduce this issue in-house would be appreciated. Stratus will test it. Deferring to RHEL 5.6, we ran out of time/resources this go around unfortunately and it sounds like you have a workaround in the meantime. This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion in the current release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Because the affected component is not scheduled to be updated in the current release, Red Hat is unfortunately unable to address this request at this time. Red Hat invites you to ask your support representative to propose this request, if appropriate and relevant, in the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Status: This is another RHEL 5 item that will most likely never make it in. It was rejected for RHEL 5.6 I don't see that changing for future minor releases. Your feedback is requested knowing this info. This problem is not a showstopper for Stratus. It is acceptable if this bug is never fixed. |