What happened to grub2?

[Adam Wolfe]

Message: 1 Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2013 07:42:51 -0500 From: Tom H 
<tomh0665 at gmail.com> To: Ubuntu Users <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> 
Subject: Re: ubuntu-users Digest, Vol 102, Issue 18 Message-ID: 
<CAOdo=SwBjgLzFA3s4eFFL_THuS3sjDNS_LSfh0Zi+K9xMht9FA at mail.gmail.com> 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:26 
PM, Adam Wolfe <kadamwolfe at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 10:56 AM, Adam Wolfe <kadamwolfe at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> [snip]
>> I'm really sorry folks, I meant to say all of the "recovery" grub options.
>> The normal boot options, and my custom ones for clonezilla and gparted isos
>> are just fine. It's the recovery options that mount everything ro and/or
>> try to fsck for no reason. This all happened after a do-release-upgrade
>> from 10.04 to 12.04.
> This is on 12.10 so it *may* be the same as 12.04, or not...
>
> I've always assumed that booting into single-user mode gave you a
> read-only "/"... I've rebooted a Gentoo VM with "S" appended and
> that's indeed the case. I don't have any other distribution that I can
> reboot at the moment to compare.
>
> I've just rebooted my 12.10 laptop with "S" appended and I ended up at
> a read-write "/".
>
> I was expecting the Ubuntu recovery menu because it's a new install
> and I havent't disabled it yet so I checked 10_linux and the
> "(recovery mode)" stanzas are now adding "recovery" rather than
> "single" (!). it must be an Ubuntu-specific option because I've never
> seen it before and it boots into the Ubuntu friendly-recovery menu. If
> you choose the "root shell" option, you get a root prompt and "/"
> mounted read-only.
>
> I assuem from your email that the "root shell" option used to give you
> a read-write "/" on 10.04. Check the sulogin (from the sysvinit-utils
> package) and friendly-recovery changelogs.
Correct.  As long as I've used Ubuntu (starting with 8.04) the recovery 
modes would mount / rw.  I'll check out sysvinit-utils.
>>>> Why does it not boot the default selection on reboot after having chosen
>>>> recovery at the previous boot?
>>> What's "GRUB_DEFAULT" set to in "/etc/default/grub"?
>> Oddly, it's "GRUB_DEFAULT=0". That was the first thing I went for as well.
>> After choosing a recovery mode, doing whatever, then rebooting, it gets to
>> the grub menu and sits. Like it's ignoring the GRUB_DEFAULT and
>> GRUB_TIMEOUT values. But it's only after booting to a recovery mode.
>> Choosing any other entry from grub, even the custom ones, then rebooting
>> again, it will then boot the set default entry.
>> Here's my full /etc/default/grub:
>> name at changeme:~$ grep -v \# /etc/default/grub
>> GRUB_DEFAULT=0
>> GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
>> GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true
>> GRUB_TIMEOUT=3
>> GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
>> GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet"
>> GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""
> It sounds like "recordfail" is coming into play.
>
> What does "grub-editenv list" return when you're booted into recovery mode?
>
Very nice, sir.  "recordfail=1".