Mounting a dirty /boot/grub hfs partition on powerpc makes it read-only, causing package grub-ieee1275 failing the upgrade

[Matteo Settenvini]

Binary package hint: grub2

Error shows when upgrading. Says that /boot/grub/grub.conf.new cannot be removed (read only fs), but I checked and it's mounted rw. Also, that file doesn't exists. Maybe it's trying to remove something that's not there?

ProblemType: Package
Architecture: powerpc
Date: Sat Aug 8 01:27:12 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
ErrorMessage: il sottoprocesso vecchio script di post-installation ha restituito un codice di errore 1
Package: grub-ieee1275 1.96+20090725-1ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.30-2.4-powerpc64-smp
SourcePackage: grub2
Title: package grub-ieee1275 1.96+20090725-1ubuntu1 failed to install/upgrade: il sottoprocesso vecchio script di post-installation ha restituito un codice di errore 1
Uname: Linux 2.6.30-2-powerpc64-smp ppc64

NOTE: please see comment #3 and apply the status of Invalid to package grub2: this is a problem with hfsprogs.

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

Artur Rona marked this a duplicate of bug #401663

[Matteo Settenvini (tchernobog)]

This is not a duplicate of bug #401663.

I've found the culprit. This bugs still occurs for me, and its not grub's fault.
On powerpc machines, the bootloader (grub2 along with yaboot) are put on a separate partition, which is HFS formatted.

I mount this partition as /boot/grub.

The problem is with hfsutils: even if they report (e.g. via the output of "mount") that this filesystem is mounted read-write, after an abrupt halting of the machine it's mounted read-only. The only real fix is to manually unmount /boot/grub, run fsck on it which clears the dirty flag, and then remounting it and running grub2 installation again.

So I believe that fixing the output of mount, or forcing a fsck when mounting a hfs volume, is the only real solution to this.

Or whenever the filesystem gets dirty, and update-grub is called, you'll get errors, potentially leaving your system unusable.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Wouldn't the best fix be for you to change the sixth field of the relevant line of /etc/fstab to 2, so that it gets checked at boot time (see 'man 5 fstab')? This is the standard, documented way to arrange for filesystems to be checked. Since the Ubuntu installer doesn't set this up by default or anything, I'm not sure what can be done about this in Ubuntu.

[Rogério Theodoro de Brito (rbrito)]

First of all, hfsprogs is a different package from hfsutils, despite the similarity in the names.

Second, usually the program that shows any "filesystem is dirty" and that it will be mounted read-only is the kernel hfsplus module.

Third, filesystems that are already dirty when they are mounted is a signal of a problem somewhere else. Probably the unmounting of them is not done correctly.

As far as I can see, this bug is invalidly reported against hfsprogs (and also grub). It would have something to do with the initial scripts.

Regards, Rogério Brito.