1547943 – Cannot boot the ReaR ISO on HP Superdome X systems due to a bug in genisoimage

Bug 1547943 - Cannot boot the ReaR ISO on HP Superdome X systems due to a bug in genisoimage

Summary: Cannot boot the ReaR ISO on HP Superdome X systems due to a bug in genisoimage

Keywords:
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG
Alias:	None
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
Classification:	Red Hat
Component:	rear
Sub Component:
Version:	7.4
Hardware:	Unspecified
OS:	Unspecified
Priority:	medium
Severity:	medium
Target Milestone:	rc
Target Release:	---
Assignee:	Pavel Cahyna
QA Contact:	BaseOS QE - Apps
Docs Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+	depends on / blocked

Reported:	2018-02-22 10:29 UTC by Renaud Métrich
Modified:	2021-09-09 13:15 UTC (History)
CC List:	2 users (show)
Fixed In Version:
Doc Type:	If docs needed, set a value
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed:	2019-02-08 18:12:57 UTC
Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Attachments	(Terms of Use)

Links
System	ID	Private	Priority	Status	Summary	Last Updated
Red Hat Bugzilla	1547934	0	medium	CLOSED	genisoimage creates an invalid UEFI partition descriptor when partition >= 32MB	2021-09-09 13:15:42 UTC
Red Hat Knowledge Base (Solution)	3392771	0	None	None	None	2018-03-27 08:34:21 UTC

Description Renaud Métrich 2018-02-22 10:29:49 UTC

Description of problem:

HP Superdome X systems with BIOS 8.5.3 in UEFI mode may not be able to boot the recovery image, due to genisoimage's BZ 1547934.
When this happens, the following error message is seen when GRUB tries to load the initramfs:

Loading initial ramdisk ... 
error: failure reading sector 0x85a90 from 'cd0'

The failing sector may vary.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

rear-2.00-4.el7_4.x86_64


Additional info:

The ReaR code creating the efiboot.img file assumes the image must be 32MB "aligned" (rear-2.00/usr/share/rear/output/ISO/Linux-i386/700_create_efibootimg.sh).

This is likely erroneous as we believe the efiboot.img cannot exceed 32MB!
Also, when setting the image size to 32MB as it is done currently (because there is almost no file to populate with), this leads genisoimage to generate a broken boot catalog entry which apparently can make the HP Superdome X BIOS fail to load the partition into memory, causing GRUB to then fail to read the initramfs for some reason.

Comment 5 Pavel Cahyna 2019-02-08 18:12:57 UTC

The problem was solved by a BIOS update.

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