Backport F-9's grub to F-8

[Eric Sandeen]

Paulo Cavalcanti wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> a couple of days ago I received a Dell Vostro 1400.
> 
> I dumped its windows vista Home edition,
> and install an F8 x86_64 image on it (I just copied the partitions from
> another computer).
> Then, I run grub-install /dev/sda using an F8 install DVD.
> 
> The problem is that when I tried to boot using the latest kernel
> 2.6.25-6-27.fc8,
> and the newer grub, the boot hanged trying to load initrd.
> 
> However, I could boot normally using a 2.6.24 or 2.6.23 kernel.
> 
> Then, I downgraded grub to 0.97-19 and finally I could boot
> to kernel 2.6.25. <http://2.6.25.>
> 
> I also noted that kernel 2.6.25 had a setup=0x300 and
> the previous kernels 0x2c00 (the only difference I could see
> loading initrd).
> 
> My question is: what has changed in grub, and
> if I had run grub-install from the newer grub (0.97-33.1) the issue
> would also be solved or could I get stuck for all kernels (not only for
> 2.6.25).

I'm not sure of the details of your problem, but just FWIW:

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F8/FEDORA-2008-4690

the latest grub is already headed for F8, for other reasons (handling
the larger ext3 inode size on F9 filesystems).

-Eric