Description of problem: Having an F8 installation on my box with some free partition. On this free partition I installed F9. So far so good: booting F9 was after install ok. Then I rebooted into the old F8 and ma a new /boot/grub/menu.lst including F9. But re-writing the bootloader by grub-install failed: problems to read /boot/grub/stage1. Booting after this with grub was impossible. Checking the inode size of the F8 partition showed me that the inode size was now 256. It seems that the F9 installer had changed the inode size of the F8 partition to 256. I had to rebuild the F8 partition by "mkfs.ext3 -I 128 ...", copy and re-copy... After this, grub-install was running properly in F8. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): F9 installer How reproducible: Steps to Reproduce: 1.Install F9 on partiton with an installed F8 2. 3. Actual results: Rebooting into F8 and starting grub-install fails: checking the grub log in /tmp showwed an error like: "Error 2: Bad file or directory type" Expected results: Bootloader is written Additional info:
Did you change the filesystem type of anything to ext4?
No. I installed F9 with ext3.
> It seems that the F9 installer had changed the inode size of the F8 partition to > 256. No, that's not possible, changing the inode size requires a reformat. However, F9 *does* default new filesystems to 256-byte inodes, as you saw, and we had to do work in grub to make it able to cope with a 256-byte inode filesystem. Where is your /boot filesystem, is it on a separate partition, who formattted it, and what inode size does it have? I think maybe we just need to backport the 256-byte inode grub fixes to F8. -Eric
No, /boot is and was part of / partition (I only remade / with a new inode size), not a separate filesystem.
Before remaking the / filesystem in F8, it had an inode size of 256, and I re-changed it to 128. I think, before F9 installation, / had already an inode size of 128. I checked this on other F8 systems. Who then is responsible for setting the inode size to 256?
It is not possible to *change* the inode size of an existing filesystem. It is set, and fixed, at mkfs time and there is currently no tool to change it without re-mkfs'ing the filesystem. Therefore I am having a hard time believing that your F8 filesystem simply changed inode sizes. The inode size fundamentally affects the filesystem geometry, and changing it would require specialized tools which do not exist at this point. :) If the F8 root had a 256-byte inode size, it *must* have been made that way at mkfs time. So you have both F8 and F9 roots; each of them has its own /boot on the root fs? I am guessing that when you tried to run grub in f8, with a grub.conf that referenced the 256-byte-inode-sized /boot for F9, it encountered this error. -Eric
You are right: both F8 and F9 have their own /boot directories (inside the / dirs.) Now in F9, I made an own boot partition, and running grub-install in F8 with this new configuration was performed, but boot F9 now fails with Error 15. (I'm sure I copied the F9 /boot completely into this new /boot partition, and I modified the correspondent F8 menu.lst entry for F9).
Ok. Running grub from F9 should work, but running grub from F8, if it references the 256-byte-inode /boot on the F9 installation, will fail. Peter, can we add the 256-byte inode fixes to f8's grub? I suppose I should have thought of that before... Thanks, -Eric
grub-0.97-33.1.fc8 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 8
Please test the grub package in updates-testing: http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=50780
Test has been successful. Thank you.
grub-0.97-33.1.fc8 has been pushed to the Fedora 8 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report. If you want to test the update, you can install it with su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update grub'. You can provide feedback for this update here: http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F8/FEDORA-2008-4690
grub-0.97-33.1.fc8 has been pushed to the Fedora 8 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
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