grub install fails if more than 7 drives exist

[Brad Parker]

Binary package hint: grub

clean install of ubuntu 8.10 on i386 machine with 4 disk controllers and 9 drives.

machine has

- motherboard ide - one PATA + one cdrom
- PCI PATA controller - two ports, one drive on each
- PCI SATA controller - two ports, one drive on each
- PCI SCSI controller - 4 drives

So, the machine has 9 drives. They all show up in the kernel under
the scsi driver, sd{a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i}

Naturally the motherboard ide drive is last, /dev/sdi

The install went fine, until the last step, where the grub install failed. No indication why.
Rebooting leaves me in the grub prompt (this drive had RH 7.3 on it before, which was LILO
based I think, but it may have had grub, not sure.) Either way when I installed I told
it to use the whole disk and autopartition.

Grub, when queried could only see 7 drives. (i.e. type "root (hd" and then hit tab)

I believe this is a sort-of known problem with grub. I found a reference to a patch on the
web which increases the max to 16. I think there is a bug filed in the gnu grub data
base, with some sort of cryptic reference to "grub2"

To fix this I had to:

1. remove all the extra controllers
2. boot off the rescue; remove grub, resinstall grub
3. recreate the menu.lst with proper UUID
4. add the controllers back in

Once grub was installed it seemed ok with the other controllers, which is somewhat
odd (but would probably make sense if I bothered to read the grub code)

I suspect the next grub or kernel upgrade will fail again, however. But no matter,
I think I can fix it now.

I'd recommend applying the 16 drive patch; it appeared to be small and clean.

[dino99 (9d9)]

outdated report & no more maintained distro; please send a new one if that issue still exist (using ubuntu-bug)