Comment 16 for bug 496435

Revision history for this message
Roland Hughes (original-seasoned-geek) wrote : Re: [Bug 496435] Re: upgrades of the grub-pc package can overwrite wrong MBR

The problem is that Grub does not respect the BIOS ordering, which
means it doesn't play with Windows, FreeDOS, DR DOS, or any other OS
that does respect BIOS ordering for multi-drive systems.

On Thursday, May 06, 2010 10:45:28 pm you wrote:
> Bump. I can attest that this symptom is present in release Lucid. I
> performed an over-the-wire upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04. On reboot,
got the
> "symbol `grub_puts_' not found" error. Interestingly, although there
are
> two SATA HDs in this machine (one spinning media, one solid-state),
the
> BIOS enumerates the SSD first, the BIOS boots off the SSD, the grub
rescue
> mode enumerates the SDD as (hd0), and the 2.6.32-22 boot files are
at
> (hd0,1)/boot. When the upgrade was running, /dev/sda was the SDD.
I
> don't find any way that the grub install/setup during the upgrade
could
> have become confused about which drive was supposed to get grub
installed
> on it, nor any evidence that the drive enumeration would have
changed.
> (The spinning disk, sdb, a.k.a. (hd1), has my 5.somtething - 9.04
> repeatedly over-the-wire upgraded image and files, which is still
attached
> since I'm not convinced I have all my settings transferred over...)
(time
> passes)
> Huh. Booting from the spinning disk gets a grub2 style menu that
can boot
> into 10.04 on sda. Now how do I fix it so grub's in the right MBR?
(time
> passes)
> Trying "sudo grub-install --root-directory=/ /dev/sda" as per
> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1014708 , linked by Jack
Fariss
> (#14). Reboot. Change BIOS boot order to boot the SDD (sda, hd0)
first
> again. Reboot. Success!
>
> So, for no apparent reason the 10.04 upgrade seems to have pushed
grub
> onto the MBR of 10.04 or possibly the lingering 9.04 grub on sdb's
MBR
> was able to find the 10.04 images and boot them. Either way...

--
Roland Hughes, President
Logikal Solutions
(630)-205-1593
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