Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 92255
bad GRUB config when downgrading Kernel with RPM
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:54:16 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312 Description of problem: Yesterday I fetched the latest kernel RPM to upgrade my Redhat-9 installation. I installed the kernel with RPM -F and everything went fine, except that on reboot X did not run because the NVidia kernel module was out of sync. To reinstall the NVidia module would require the kernel sources that I had not available just now. No problem, the kernel upgrade was just for fun, not because of a real problem I had encountered. The fix should be easy: just downgrade to the old kernel. rpm -F doesnt do this, so I did rpm -e --nodeps kernel. This caused the first problem: grubby complained that it could not find a valid template. The problem persisted when I reinstalled the old kernel with rpm -i kernel.... Inspecting the grub.conf file revealed that there was no section for the kernel, so a reboot would fail. I fixed this by hand, but am still unable to perform an automated kernel upgrade. I think that this is bad behaviour: 1) There is no real need to touch the grub.conf file at all. Just set a link to the kernel image that should be booted. 2) If the grub.conf file is touched for whatever reason, grub.conf should be considered a config file that needs a backup. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.4.20-9 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. upgrade kernel with rpm -F kernel...rpm 2. uninstall kernel with rpm -e kernel 3. reinstall older kernel with rpm -i kernel...rpm Actual Results: damaged grub.conf file in /boot/grub Expected Results: valid grub.conf file Additional info: none
Same problems here. In my case it had even more annoying consequences. Even with a reconstructed grub.conf file (I think I reconstructed it correctly), the machine won't boot. It simply stops at "GRUB". I need to use now a boot disk. Do I need to "revalidate" my grub configuration, somehow? (Something in the spirit of 'lilo -v') I don't know how to get this repaired. I am a little bit afraid to update the kernel now and discover that it only makes things worse... Daniel
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 60041 ***
I am glad to see that the problem has been identified but it does not solve the consequences of this bug for me: I have a non working GRUB because of an unsuccessful upgrade of the kernel (my / partition was too small). I tried to recreate the grub.conf file (and I think I did it right) but still, I can't reboot the machine. It says 'GRUB' and freezes. What am I supposed to do?
Changed to 'CLOSED' state since 'RESOLVED' has been deprecated.