Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 50904
Installer does not seem to install Grub
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:35:29 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.2) Gecko/20010725 Description of problem: This bug is similar to Bug 50800 (and a little like 50821), although my results differ. It seems that Grub does not actually get installed to my MBR during installation. It never crashes on me, though, as it has to other people. I tried this install 4 times. Twice using the GUI, twice using the text installer. Each with the same result. I have Win2000 on hda and Linux on hdb. The first attempt, I got an LI response on boot. This is left over from the Seawolf copy I had installed that I over-wrote to test Roswell. I went back and used a DOS boot floppy to fdisk /mbr so that I could get back into Windows at least. From there, the last 3 subsequent attempts offered no boot option and it went straight into Windows. It seems to have never written to the boot record. Using the boot floppy I created during the install gave me this result: could not find kernel image: linux. After finding 2 bugs listed here related to Grub, I decided on the 5th attempt to use LILO. Lo and behold, everything worked just fine and my system booted up my Linux disk as expected. I am assuming this is a problem with the installer, since it "appears" that Grub never makes it to the boot record during the install. How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install 2. Choose Grub option for bootloader 3. Reboot 4. It's not there Actual Results: The system appears to boot using whatever was previously in the MBR. In my case, the first time being a previous LILO, then later just to Windows after I had restored the MBR with fdisk /mbr earlier to get back into that drive. Expected Results: It should have brought some sort of menu from Grub (don't know what exactly; I've only used LILO in the past) to boot one of my systems. Additional info: 1GHz Athlon Abit KT7 320MB RAM 1 CD-ROM / 1 CD-RW 2 Hard drives - 40GB each - hdb partitioned with /, /boot, swap - hda single partition for Windows 2000 (FAT32) - Not using Windows NT bootloader, since it's FAT32 and I really don't care if Windows doesn't come up ;) 3.5" floppy ATI Radeon (AGP) VIVO
We (Red Hat) really need to fix this defect before next release.
Could you attach your /boot/grub/grub.conf and /boot/grub/device.map files? (they get generated even if you use LILO as your bootloader)
Unfortunately, since it's been a few days and kept me out of my system, I went back and wiped that configuration out and restored a previous set-up. Is there anything that is contained in those configuration files that I can relay somehow else? Such as partitions, etc? All of that is still set up the same. Or were these needed to see how grub tried to affect the boot process?
From what you've given, this should be fixed in CVS