[Savannah-hackers-public] Re: [gnu.org #498996] Hard-disk failures on colonialone

[Sylvain Beucler]

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 01:41:35PM -0500, Daniel Clark via RT wrote:
> My next openings for off-hours maintenance (all New_York time) are:
> 
> Sat Dec 5 6pm-8pm
> Sun Dec 6 2pm-8pm

This one (Dec6 7pm/1am UTC) is the only one when I'm available (and
awake renough :)).

> Mon Dec 7 6pm-8pm
> Sat Dec 12 10:30am-8pm
> Sun Dec 13 6pm-8pm
> 
> Please tell me if any of these are good for you.
> 
> We'll of course want to form a plan about what to do differently before
> the maintenance. I'll also try to get the PXE boot stuff doc'ed on our
> side so we can use that as a possible workaround if things should not
> work again.

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/html_node/Stage1-errors.html#Stage1-errors
"Hard Disk Error"
    The stage2 or stage1.5 is being read from a hard disk, and the
    attempt to determine the size and geometry of the hard disk
    failed.

I can only guess that the 1.0TB geometry (used by grub-install) isn't
the same as the 1.5TB geometry.

I'll check if there's a way to make grub-install use the 1.5TB disk
when locating /boot, otherwise the easiest way is to boot on a rescue
system as you suggested, chroot in the real system and re-run
grub-install from there.

-- 
Sylvain