Roman Kyrylych wrote:
2008/2/9, Jan de Groot<jan@jgc.homeip.net>:
Creating a boot filesystem with the default settings for mke2fs will render grub useless because grub can't read partitions created with it.
The issue is that the inode size is 256 by default, which is compatible with kernel 2.6.10 and higher. Older kernels, and also grub won't work with anything else than 128, which is the default according to the manpage (but clearly isn't).
We should fix this before making our new installer CD and we should nag upstream about this. During my search for a solution, I found not a single solution, but several forum posts coming from several distributions, all without solution other than "install lilo, grub is broken on my distro".
That sucks. :-( Where the hell those developers look before doing such stupid incompatible changes? :-/
That's funny, my first feeling when I read about that issue was : Why the hell did those developers put such stupid limitation? :) (or: did not remove) Well, my first result on google looks interesting : http://people.debian.org/~terpstra/message/20080130.140155.866d3ad1.en.html There is a patch attached, and the following information :
Even though I understand that grub(-legacy) is in feature freeze (grub2 does already support booting from ext3 partitions with 256 byte inodes), I personally would prefer an update to grub 0.97, given that this issue leaves the (newly installed/ moved) system unbootable without any chance for manual interaction (grub neither installs and dies without any message) and that the patch seems to be of reasonable size, while grub2 doesn't seem to be ready for mass deployment.