[gentoo-user] Re: Grub broke out of the blue

[Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de>]

Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Feb 2009 06:17:07 +0200, Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
> 
>> I've no idea how it broke, but after an emerge --sync, a kernel 
>> (gentoo-sources) update was there.  After I compiled the kernel, I did 
>> the usual "make modules_install && make install".  I edited grub.conf 
>> only to the point of changing the booted kernel to the
>> new one (just a matter of changing -r1 to -r2 at the end of the kernel
>> filename).  I reboot, Grub stops working.  It just displays "GRUB" and
>> hangs there.
> 
> Could you have inadvertently made more of a change to grub.conf than
> that? Grub is notoriously fragile when it comes to its config file?

No, the change was a simple change of 1 byte ("1" -> "2").


> Why did you edit it in the first place? As you used make install,you will
> have symlinks from vmlinuz and vmlinuz.old to the new and previous
> kernels. Use these in GRUB and there's no need to edit anything.

That won't work for me because I keep two different kernels (one for 
vmware and one for native) and I sometimes rebuild one of them after 
reconfiguring.  With that approach I would end up with the "Native" Grub 
entry trying to boot the vmware kernel.

One thing that could be at fault is that I had grub installed into hd0,2 
(sda3) which is an ext4 partition.  /boot is sda4 and is ext3.  But I'm 
sure grub should work no matter where you install it.  I can even 
install it on sda1 which is NTFS and it works.  Hell, I can even install 
it on the swap partition.

I guess the reason it broke will remain a mystery :P