follow-up on GRUB woes

[James Gregory]

So, good news and bad news.

First of all, good news is that the damage done to my hard disks in
previous attempts at this was recoverable. xfs_repair is truly a
beautiful thing.

Next, I am now pretty much certain that this computer is completely un-
grubbable. After I got my partitions fixed I tried using grub from the
fedora install that was on there which failed in another, more different
way. I think upstream GRUB still has some stuff to sort out.

Finally, I discovered something on this most recent install of ubuntu
that I hadn't seen before. If you can get the grub install to fail
spectacularly enough, you'll be dropped back to the menu of "things to
do". One of those "things" is "install LILO". So I tried that, and it
didn't actually work, but it did install a lilo.conf file. I booted from
the ubuntu live-cd (which I've been using as a rescue CD), chrooted and
ran lilo and now I can boot ubuntu (I can't boot fedora, but I'm going
to live with that for now).

So anyway, I've managed to get it to go.

It's probably too late for code changes to deal with all this stuff, but
I think there needs to be an errata somewhere or something that tells
people in no uncertain terms:

* XFS and ReiserFS are a no-go. They won't work.
* Highpoint RAID controllers are also a no-go. Don't even waste your
time.

Both of these cases appear to be dealt with by lilo. Perhaps hoary
should look for these conditions and suggest installing lilo instead of
grub.

I'll hopefully get back to you with some feedback on the actual system
real soon now.

James.

-- 
James Gregory <james at james.id.au>
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