From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040510 Description of problem: During upgrades from FC1 or RH to FC2 anaconda removes the GRUB entries for the alternate installation partitions. Leaves W2K or XP entries in the new /boot/grub/grub.conf Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): anaconda-10.0-5 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Upgrade to FC2 with multiple instances of FC1 or RH. 2. 3. Actual Results: The grub entries for alternate installations of FC or RH are removed. Expected Results: Only the entries for the root/boot partition[s] being upgraded should be touched. Alternate entries should be preserved. Additional info:
Did you select upgrade boot loader or install new boot loader? What did your grub.conf look like before and after?
Selected to upgrade the boot loader. Will create an attachment with (reconstructed as closely as possible) FC1 grub.conf and post-upgrade FC2 grub.conf.
Created attachment 100831 [details] grub.conf before and after upgrade (.FC1 and .FC2) Had to reconstruct the before (grub.conf.FC1) file from the one on the alternate boot partition as the original was clobbered by the upgrade.
Were the other kernels in this config installed via RPM? ie, do the vmlinuz files still exist?
The kernel files in /boot on the alternate FC1 installation are still present, both RPM installs and custom-build. On the upgraded /boot, the RPM-installed kernel files were removed, the custom-built ones are still present, but all other FC1 GRUB boot stanzas for both partitions were removed. Only the FC2-installed biit entries and the one for W2K remained.
Fat-fingered that one - should (obviously?) have been "boot" not "biit'.
In a situation with multiple alternate installations I found that the most practical way to organize booting is not to drop everything into one "monster menu" but to have "the main" grub menu which really is only a dispatcher and does 'chainload ...' for any of a "second tier" particular OS specific loader installed on boot partitions for every (sub)installation. For Linux this will be a separate for each installation copy of grub; not even necessarily the same grub version. Now any changes by update tools (anaconda, yum, whatever ... ) affect only what is relevant and these tools are not even aware of other stuff. As a side effect you may now have not only a default boot entry in the top menu but also a default entry for every of subinstallations. Much easier to maintain the whole structure as you never have to worry what belongs to what.
OK - Lets get this one off the books.