Bug 234158

Summary: Hard to re-install grub from rescue mode
Product: [openSUSE] openSUSE 10.2 Reporter: Aaron Mulder <ammulder>
Component: InstallationAssignee: E-mail List <bnc-team-screening>
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE QA Contact: Jiri Srain <jsrain>
Severity: Normal    
Priority: P5 - None    
Version: Final   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: Other   
OS: Other   
Whiteboard:
Found By: Other Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description Aaron Mulder 2007-01-12 17:28:15 UTC
Due to a different bug, I needed to re-install grub on a system that just finished the first phase (software installation) of the 10.2 install.

I booted from the install CD and selected rescue mode.  It booted into rescue mode.

On this machine, the hard drive is /dev/hdc and the root partition is /dev/hdc2.

I tried the following:

mount /dev/hdc2 /mnt
chroot /mnt
grub-install /dev/hdc

This failed with an error like "/dev/hdc: no such device".  Indeed, the /dev partition was virtually empty.  It was not obvious how to fix that ("mount /dev" did not work).

I tried exiting the chroot and running grub-install /dev/hdc from there, and it failed saying something like "/boot/grub is read-only".

I finally got this to working by noting all the details on /dev/hdc through /dec/hdc3 in the rescue environment, running the chroot, running all the right mknod commands, and then running grub-install.

This was really irritating -- as of SuSE 9.x and maybe even 10.0 it was not necessary to run mknod commands to re-install grub this way -- the /dev area of the chroot environment was populated enough, I guess.  Any advice?  (I would guess re-installing the boot loader was a pretty common use of rescue mode.)
Comment 1 Cyril Hrubis 2007-01-16 11:23:01 UTC

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 225603 ***