Grub will not install to XFS Formatted Partition

The installer automatically uses lilo in that case (thus, no grub-installer
bug), and lilo seems to work perfectly fine for me. Please elaborate on your
problems with lilo.

(In reply to comment #1)
> The installer automatically uses lilo in that case (thus, no grub-installer
> bug), and lilo seems to work perfectly fine for me. Please elaborate on your
> problems with lilo.

I have the same problem while trying to install breezy. It's advised not to use grub for
XFS partitions, so I choose to use lilo instead. But lilo fails with the following:

"""
Device 0x0300: Inconsistent partition table, 1st entry
  CHS address in PT: 965:1:1 --> LBA (972783)
  LBA address in PT: 14590863 --> CHS (14475:1:1)
Fatal: Either FIX-TABLE or IGNORE-TABLE must be specified
If not sure, first try IGNORE-TABLE (-P ignore)
"""

I tried with 'lilo -P ignore', but it failed with:

"""
Device 0x0300: Inconsistent partition table, 1st entry
  CHS address in PT: 965:1:1 --> LBA (972783)
  LBA address in PT: 14590863 --> CHS (14475:1:1)
The partition table is *NOT* being adjusted.
Fatal: Filesystem would be destroyed by LILO boot sector: /dev/hda1
"""

Is it safe to try 'lilo -P fix', or is it possible that something would break? (I have
important information on other partitions)

Bjorn's lilo issue seems to be unrelated to XFS; lilo is complaining that the
partition table is broken, not that it can't deal with some filesystem.

Is this still a problem for dapper?

On Wed, Mar 29, 2006 at 12:38:18PM -0000, Martin Bergner wrote:
> Public bug report changed:
> https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/13851
>
> Comment:
> Is this still a problem for dapper?

Don't know yet, when I installed dapper I used an ext3 boot partition,
since I knew that worked. I'll try using an XFS partition when
installing dapper on another machine though. I'll let you know if it
works or not.

Yes, this is a pretty notorious problem that as far as I know is hard to fix and has not been fixed.

Changing to Confirmed to acknowledge the issue.

Thank you for reporting this bug.

Reading http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/faq.html#grubwork says:

 Q: Does GRUB work with XFS?

There is native XFS filesystem support for GRUB starting with version 0.91 and onward. Unfortunately, GRUB used to make incorrect assumptions about being able to read a block device image while a filesystem is mounted and actively being written to, which could cause intermittent problems when using XFS. This has reportedly since been fixed, and the 0.97 version (at least) of GRUB is apparently stable.

Well, I tried out a Dapper installation with GRUB and XFS and it still doesn't work properly, failing in exactly the same way as before. Sorry.

ubiquity doesn't handle the grub+xfs thing at all, it just crashes.

 I booted the i386 live DVD on a laptop, and shrunk the windows partition, then used the install menu item. I don't think I did anything to confuse ubiquity, but I hadn't used it before. (I'm used to installing Debian with the debian-installer menu interface, but I wanted to try this install thing in the menu...)

 Anyway, I made / and /home XFS, and I didn't use a /boot. Ubiquity died right at the end, with no warning that I could have a GRUB+XFS problem. (At least I don't think it warned. Maybe it did, but it wasn't very emphatic about it, so it sounded like it wouldn't hurt to try.) In any case it shouldn't crash, it should recognize that grub failed.

 I saved the error logs and stuff, so I can create a new bug # if you want. I thought there looked like plenty of bugs open already about the installer crashing.

On di, 2006-08-08 at 20:56 +0000, Peter Cordes wrote:

> I saved the error logs and stuff, so I can create a new bug # if you
> want. I thought there looked like plenty of bugs open already about
> the installer crashing.

That is https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/47848
and a gazillion duplicates.
--
Dennis K.

Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.

Should this be marked as a duplicate of bug #8058?

Given that this bug was
a) reported a long time ago
b) is reported against an unsupported release
c) is most likely a duplicate of bug #8058
I think it's fairly safe to mark it as such for good housekeeping practice. Please feel free to revert the change if you feel that's necessary.

By the way, if LILO has the same issue, there should probably be a separate bug report for it, unless the reporter confused the two.

Looks like that bug is still present in Feisty Fawn. Nor grub or lilo will install on XFS. Really annoying, and for some users it can be a show stopper...

On Thu, 2007-05-10 at 07:02 +0000, Mourad Mokrane wrote:
> *** This bug is a duplicate of bug 8058 ***
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/8058
>
> Looks like that bug is still present in Feisty Fawn. Nor grub or lilo
> will install on XFS. Really annoying, and for some users it can be a
> show stopper...

ext3 /boot and xfs / works okay.
--
Stewart Smith (<email address hidden>)
http://www.flamingspork.com/