grub-install fails during install from livecd for XFS

[mark stover]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

I am using the latest daily livecd from Jaunty Jackalope 9.04 alpha (Fri Jan 30th 2009). I have an NTFS Windows XP partition on sda1, and created an XFS partition on sda2, and my swap on an extended partition on sda5.

When the install gets to the point of running grub-install, it fails and ubiquity exits with a fatal error. I've tracked it down to the block of code in /usr/sbin/grub-install at line 490:

# On XFS, sync() is not enough.
if [ `grub-probe -t fs ${grubdir}` = "xfs" ] ; then
  xfs_freeze -f ${grubdir} && xfs_freeze -u ${grubdir}
  # We don't have set -e. If xfs_freeze failed, it's worth trying anyway,
  # maybe we're lucky.
fi

grub-probe is unavailable on the live-cd , and when the check fails it never runs the xfs_freeze. When I changed the partition to JFS, installation completed successfully.

This may be related to bug 181812 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/181812

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Thanks for your report. This was also bug 328633, since fixed.

The only relation this bears to bug 181812 is that both concern grub; they are otherwise unrelated.