zfs discuss - Aug 2008 - Diagnosing problems after botched upgrade - grub busted

I tried to be clever and botched my upgrade.  Now I don''t get a grub
menu,
only an error like this:

====================Booting ''BE3 Solaris xVM''

findroot (BE_BE3,1,a)

Error 15: File not found

Press any key to continue
====================

I do not see a grub menu prior to this error, only the Stage1 Stage2 message
which goes past very fast.

Prior to this error I booted from a CD to single-user mode and ran
installgrub stage1 stage2 /dev/rdsk/XXXXXs0

I did this because at that point grub just gave me a grub prompt and I
don''t
know grub well enough to boot from there.  I rather suspect that if I manage
to boot the system there will be a way to fix it permanently.  But now
rather let me give the sequence of events that led up to this in the order
they happened.

1.  I took the disk out of the laptop, and made it bootable in an external
enclosure.  This was a couple of days ago - I posted about the fun I had
with that previously, but essentially booting to safemode and importing the
rpool caused the on-disk device-path to be updated, making the disk once
more bootable.

2. I partitioned the new disk, creating a solaris2 partition and on that a
single hog-slice layout.  s0 is the whole partition, minus slice 8 and 9.

3. I create a new future root pool, like this
zpool create RPOOL -f c0d0s0

Note:  -f required because s2 overlaps.

4. Ran lucreate, like this
lucreate -p RPOOL -n BE4

This finished fine.  I used upper-case RPOOL to distinguish it from the BE3
rpool.

5. mounted new Nevada build ISO on /mnt and ran upgraded the live-upgrade
packages.

6. luupgrade -s /mnt -n BE4

7. lumount BE4 and peeked around in there a little.

After this I rebooted, and got no grub menu, just a grub> prompt.

I then booted from the CD and ran installgrub.  Not being able to get to man
pages, I have tried it two times with different options, with reboots in
between, like this:
> installgrub zfs_stage1_5 stage2 /dev/rds/xxxxs0
> installgrub -m stage1 stage2 /dev/rdsk/xxxxxxs2
This at least got me the error above (Am I now worse off or better off than
I were when I had the grub> prmpt?).

I then booted from the CD again and tried /boot/solaris/bin/update_grub as I
found that in these forums, but it does not seem to have made any
difference.  I don''t know if the command takes any options, I just ran
it
and it finished very quickly and without errors.

Note: Due to past editing of the menu.lst file, the default item points to
the BE3 xVM entry.  I just tap the up-arrow and enter to load the
"non-xVM"
entry.

Note: I never ran luactivate during the above procedure.

Note: When booting to single-user shell from the install CD, it tells me
that it finds both rpool (BE3) and RPOOL (BE4), allowing me to select one to
mount on /a, however they do not mount, I get an error but I forgot to write
that down.  I get the same error for both.

I could now just re-install and recover my data (I keep my data far away
from OS disks/pools), or I can try to fix grub.  I hope to learn from this
process so my questions are:

1. What is up with grub here?  I don''t get a menu, but it does remember
the
old menu entry name for the default entry.  This happens even when I try to
boot without the External drive plugged in.

2. How can I edit the grub commands?  What does "Error 15: File not
found"
mean?  Is it looking for the grub menu?  Or a program to boot?

3. Removing the internal disk from the machine may help... I am not sure to
what extent grub uses the BIOS boot disk priority... Maybe that will get the
external disk bootable again?

4. Should I try to get the grub menu back (from where I can try options to
edit the boot entries), or should I try to get the grub> prompt back?  Or
should I try to get one of the pools to import?  Where do I go from here?

Note: I have been careful not to touch or break anything on the external
disk.  However I never tried to reboot since partitioning the new disk with
an ACTIVE partition, the way it is at present.  I think this could also
affect grub''s perception of what disks are what.

Thank you,
  _Johan
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On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 11:43 PM, Johan Hartzenberg <jhartzen at
gmail.com>wrote:
> [snip]
> I could now just re-install and recover my data (I keep my data far away
> from OS disks/pools), or I can try to fix grub.  I hope to learn from this
> process so my questions are:
>
> 1. What is up with grub here?  I don''t get a menu, but it does
remember the
> old menu entry name for the default entry.  This happens even when I try to
> boot without the External drive plugged in.
>
> 2. How can I edit the grub commands?  What does "Error 15: File not
found"
> mean?  Is it looking for the grub menu?  Or a program to boot?
>
> 3. Removing the internal disk from the machine may help... I am not sure to
> what extent grub uses the BIOS boot disk priority... Maybe that will get
the
> external disk bootable again?
>
> 4. Should I try to get the grub menu back (from where I can try options to
> edit the boot entries), or should I try to get the grub> prompt back? 
Or
> should I try to get one of the pools to import?  Where do I go from here?
>
> Note: I have been careful not to touch or break anything on the external
> disk.  However I never tried to reboot since partitioning the new disk with
> an ACTIVE partition, the way it is at present.  I think this could also
> affect grub''s perception of what disks are what.
>
> Thank you,
>   _Johan
>
I physically removed the internal disk.  I am now able to boot again, at
least temporarily.
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