This morning I got bit by what appears to be a nasty grub/anaconda bug. I was upgrading my Fedora 16 laptop to Fedora 17 and ran into some issues.
This is the best I can tell what happened:
I installed Fedora 15 using the following partition scheme:
1G /boot partition 122G windows vista partition (NTFS) 50G Fat16 partition 526G lvm partition * swap, /, /home and /srv are each LVs on this VG
upgraded to Fedora 16 using the DVD.
upgraded to Fedora 17 using the DVD, anaconda had an error message stating there were "bootloader problems" and said there would be issues rebooting.
rebooted and got the grub rescue prompt.
rebooted again into rescue mode, using the fedora 17 DVD, and tried to do 'grub2-install /dev/sda' which is where I got the above error:
Path `/boot/grub2` is not readable by GRUB on boot. Installation is
impossible. Aborting.
After some googling I found this bug report but there didn't seem to be any resolution.
So I banged my head against this problem and stumbled into a work-around. (this should be done in a chrooted environment inside the rescue method of the Fedora DVD)
backup the /boot partition
mkdir /boot-backup rsync -rav /boot/. /boot-backup/
unmount and zero out the boot partition
umount /boot dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=1024k
create a new ext4 filesystem
mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sda1 mount /dev/sda1 /boot
re-run grub2-install
grub2-install /dev/sda
copy the files out of the new /boot into /boot-backup
rsync -rav /boot/. /boot-backup/.
copy the backed up files BACK into place
rsync -rav /boot-backup/. /boot/.
re-generate the grub2 config
grub2-mkconfig > /boot/grub/grub.cfg
at that point you should be able to exit the rescue mode, and reboot and things should be back to normal.
If not ping the bug and have them fix it.
Also, it's nigh on impossible to replicate by just installing Fedora 16 then trying to upgrade. It appears to be an issue with the Fedora 15 created partition scheme.
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