freezing machine updated/upgraded to rawhide/current sulfur

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Fri, May 09, 2008 at 07:07:55PM -0700, Antonio Olivares wrote:
> 
> I have updated/upgraded the machine that was freezing all the time
> to Rawhide using Fedora Preview Iso + Updates.  
> 
> There is only one gotcha. Grub is not working correctly?
> 
> When starting up machine. IT does nothing it stays at 
> 
> GRUB

AFAIK grub-0.97 will not load boot files from a partition with
inode size bigger that 128. That was not an issue in the past
but the current mke2fs, when a partition is "big enough" - I
believe, will use by default 256 bytes inodes.  This should make
possible a future migration to ext4.  I wonder if this is not
the problem you are seeing?

> I can successfully boot it using livecd's to boot the partition.

In that case you can check.  Boot that way and run

   tune2fs -l /dev/sda2 | grep 'Inode size'

to see if the above is really the case.  This assumes that
/dev/sda2 is really the partition in question but "root (hd0,1)"
seems to support that.

If my guess is correct then you would have to redo a file system
on /dev/sda2 with an explicit '-I 128' request to mke2fs before
restoring a content of this partition and reinstalling grub
once again.  Mind you, such action will change UUID so if that
file system doubles as / then your current grub.conf and
/etc/fstab will become invalid and will have to be adjusted.
The later file will likely need changes in any case.

If you can confirm that this is what really happened then
there is a really serious "gotcha" in anaconda.

   Michal