installer should warn that a patched version of grub is needed for new ext3 file system with 256 bit inodes.

[Alan Searchwell]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

I have two root partitions defined on my disk plus a home partition as follows:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1165 9357831 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 1166 1295 1044225 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3 1296 6349 40596255 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4 6350 14593 66219930 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 13670 14593 7421998+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 12087 13669 12715416 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 6350 12086 46082389+ 83 Linux

I use the Gutsy installation on sda6 daily and this installation uses sda7 as /home while I have used the installation on sda5 for testing new versions like Hardy and now Intrepid.

During the install of the beta of Intrepid 8.10 beta (released Oct 10). I decided not to install grub to the mbr but, the root of sda5 instead. On the completion of the install my plan was to boot into Gutsy and access the Hardy partition and copy the entries in /boot/grub/menu.lst that relate to the new Intrepid install into the menu.lst on sda6 so that I could boot into the new installation. As a result of formatting sda5, changing it's UUID, I had problems booting Gutsy and had to resolve that issue. Once I sorted that out, I received the message "Error 2: bad file or directory" when trying to boot Intrepid.

I found that the problem is that the new installation ext3 file system uses 256 bit inodes rather that 128 bit ones and the current version of grub (GRUB 0.97-29ubuntu4). needs to be patched to handle that. That version that works is GRUB 0.97-29ubuntu45.

When doing an install that formats ext3 with 256 bit inodes on a system that has GRUB 0.97-29ubuntu4 installed, the installer should warn the user that the currently installed version of grub is incompatible with the file system on the new install and should be replaced by GRUB 0.97-29ubuntu45. It could also suggest that if a Windows boot-loader exists on the disk, the latest version of grub4dos (0.4.4) could be used to access the new install. This is the route I used to get into my new Intrepid install from which, I installed the patched version of grub to the mbr. It would have been a more pleasant, almost perfect install, if I had been warned and installed the patched version of grub from the install.

Alan

[jerryb (gerald-britton)]

I'm running grub 0.97-29ubuntu53. It has the same problem

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

This was fixed years ago.