Comment 12 for bug 554307

Thanks, EvilSupahFly. I can now add this:

Rm'ing every grub related file on the other systems, reinstalling grub, and running update-grub was REALLY BAD IDEA. Now when I try to boot /dev/sda6 (the system that is an fsarchiver-made clone of my main, /dev/sda5-based 14.04 system, where grub is supposed to live) all I get is BusyBox with a prompt something like "[initramfs]". So now my sda5 system is broken. But I can restore the fsa backup again easily enough.

It is possible, AFAIK from my own ignorance, that a modified approach like that MIGHT work, if you knew exactly WHICH grub related files to rm, and if anyone thinks that's the case, I'd appreciate their expanding on the topic, as it sounds to me as if, that if something like that would work at all it might be either something I'd only have to do once, or failing that, something that might be simple enough to write a script to do, and run that script every time I run dist-upgrade or restore an fsarchiver backup to a partition it wasn't on originally.

When you say manual editing works for you, I assume you mean editing grub.cfg on the system that should be the one where grub was last installed via a regular installation procedure (as opposed to restoring a clone with fsarchiver or Clonezilla). As for update-grub rewriting it incorrectly, I could just mark it read-only or take the x perm off update-grub, or alias update-grub to something innocuous. As for grub.cfg getting outdated and booting old kernels (or crashing if they've been removed), I seem to remember there is some way to make an entry that in effect says "boot from the latest one there, whatever it is". If I had a grub.cfg like that, could I just disable os-prober and update-grub, and not have to edit until I changed my partition setup?

Would having a seperate boot partition get me around all this and let grub work automatically?

If I have to manually edit grub.cfg every time a kernel is updated, or every time I install an OS or restore an fsa or clonezilla backup, would I be better off switching to a boot loader that was written with the INTENT that a boot configuration file would have to be manually maintained?

I've also tried the LILO approach since I posted. It does boot my main /dev/sda5 14.04 fine, but it didn't pick up on any of the other systems automatically. So I purged it with apt-get and reinstalled grub ("grub '2'") hoping I could get find the magic spell to make grub-2 work automatically, but so far I haven't. So, if I DO have to hand edit every time constantly, maybe I should revert that.

At any rate, anyone reading this looking for work arounds will now know at least one thing that does NOT work. Anyone with thoughts on how to set up a low maintenance boot loader, either with grub-2 or something else, that can cope with new OSs coming and going through normal installation and clone restoration, please share your ideas.

Meanwhile, I think I'm going to read up on boot partitions. Thanks for reading.