GRUB and ReiserFS in 1.4-rc1

plate · Posted: Thu Sep 19, 2002 12:58 am Post subject: GRUB and ReiserFS in 1.4-rc1

I had a successful installation of 1.4-rc1 on an Athlon 600 Mhz last night, except that I couldn't get GRUB to recognise my ReiserFS partitions, including /boot. As it turns out, GRUB v0.9 never could... If this is true, perhaps someone should change the installation instructions accordingly or unmask a later version of GRUB. Since ReiserFS now seems to have Gentoo's blessing, I suppose a few other people will run into the same problem I had.

So I unmasked 0.9.2 and emerged it. GRUB - and I had geometry (hd0) check that - now acknowledges the existence of ReiserFS on both /boot and /, but in spite of my totally orthodox entry in grub.conf (which is replacing menu.lst in the new GRUB) I get dropped off at the GRUB shell prompt, no splashimage, no title, no kernel to boot. Manually loading the kernel and booting works up to a point, I get kernel panic for "VFS: cannot load root fs at 03.03", but that may be just a missing boot option.

Given the fact that I've religiously followed the installation guide in every respect except grub.conf vs. menu.lst (and just to make sure, I've even copied it over, so I have both now), does anyone have an idea what's going wrong here?

rac · Posted: Thu Sep 19, 2002 1:39 am Post subject:

Strange. Works for me.

plate · Posted: Thu Sep 19, 2002 2:03 am Post subject:

That is strange.

I thought 0.90 couldn't do that? Guess I fell for the wrong rumours... In case your German is a little rusty, this bloke Lumen claims that the patched 0.90 version of GRUB in Gentoo doesn't recognise ReiserFS, and he had to patch it himself to get it working. Does the link he gives make any sense to you?

But new or old, once it recognises the filesystem it really should work, though, shouldn't it? Why am I being dropped off at the "grub >" prompt instead of having it load my menu from grub.conf?

rac · Posted: Thu Sep 19, 2002 3:10 am Post subject:

Maybe the difference is that my /boot is ext2. Could this message shed any light? Would it be possible to change the filesystem on your /boot partition, if you are having problems?
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plate · Posted: Thu Sep 19, 2002 4:28 am Post subject:

The filesystem is now recognised at boot (had ReiserFS kernel support compiled as a module, duh :oops:

) so I'm not getting that dreadful

rac · Posted: Thu Sep 19, 2002 4:45 am Post subject:

c_kuzmanic · Posted: Thu Sep 19, 2002 11:22 am Post subject:

I had a prob with grub and reiserfs when my /boot partition was reiserfs. Even after struggling with it extensively I was not able to get Grub to recognize reiserfs. Solved the problem by simply using ext3 on /boot instead. The problem with grub/reiserfs on a /boot partition should definitively be mentioned in the install docs.

plate · Posted: Thu Sep 19, 2002 3:50 pm Post subject:

phong · Posted: Thu Sep 19, 2002 5:06 pm Post subject:

Since /boot is normally left unmounted in a "default" Gentoo install, and you're not going to be reading/writing to it all the time, it's probably overkill to use a journaling filesystem anyway. If I hose my grub configuration and need to get in there with a boot floppy (such as tomsrtbt which is very good), I'll want it to be ext2/3 - it doesn't support Reiser or XFS.
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plate · Posted: Thu Sep 19, 2002 5:18 pm Post subject:

Excellent point, I hadn't thought about that. Doesn't really matter on a desktop, but I'll keep it in mind for my next notebook install: None of the Vaios around the house can boot from the Gentoo CD...

Bogo · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 04 May 2002 Posts: 98

Using ReiserFS as my boot partition has always worked until now.
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mikegr · n00b Joined: 20 Aug 2002 Posts: 11 Location: Linz, Austria

I have the same problem when I installed Gentoo 1.4rc
I 've already gentoo 1,2 installed and created a new reiserfs partition.
After the installtion I make a grub entry for the new system. At boot time I got the message "Error 17" that it cannnot recognize the type of the filesystem. After hours of trying to modify my menu.lst I backuped the partition and try to format again. I know it must work, because my gentoo 1.2 installation is also on a reiserfs partition and boots well.
But no success. Then I tried to format with the gentoo 1.4 bootcd. no success.
At last I took my old Gentoo 1.2 Boot-Cd, format the partition with mkreiserfs und NOW grub knows the filesystem type.

So my experience is that there is something wrong with the 'mkreiserfs' command. Maybe I' wrong, but if someone has problems with reiserfs and grub he should try to format with the gentoo 1.2 boot cd.

Any comments?

meyerm · Posted: Fri Sep 27, 2002 8:31 pm Post subject:

Just an idea: can it be that grub works with reiserfs-3.5 but not with reiserfs-3.6?

rac · Posted: Fri Sep 27, 2002 9:09 pm Post subject:

rebernd · n00b Joined: 24 Sep 2002 Posts: 3 Location: Switzerland

Malakin · Posted: Thu Oct 31, 2002 2:23 am Post subject:

I grabbed a copy of grub from cvs and it seemed to identify the reiser partion fine. When booting I then got an "error 17" and grub would freeze up, not sure if this has anything to do with my using a cvs version or it's something unlrelated.

I've always liked grub but I ended up moving to lilo and it worked fine on the first try.

rac · Posted: Thu Oct 31, 2002 3:11 am Post subject:

Since this thread has jumped up again, I would like to add that it shouldn't be necessary to use an old version of reiserfstools - 3.6 mkreiserfs supports the --format 3.5 option.
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PlatinumCursor · Posted: Thu Oct 31, 2002 5:13 pm Post subject:

I also have had this problem, and instead of switching filesystems I just opted to emerge lilo and edit the lilo.conf to suit my needs and running /sbin/lilo. Maybe in a few months I will see if GRUB works for reiserfs.
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ptheborg · Posted: Thu Oct 31, 2002 8:23 pm Post subject:

Today was the big day, finally I had some time to spent on reinstalling my laptop with the all new and fresh Gentoo 1.4rc1.

Everything went smoothly until I ran into the exact same problem. Fortunately there's a forum, and although this isn't an official support forum, it did help me

.

First thing I did was formatting with mkreiserfs from the 1.4rc1 Livecd. Then doing root (hd0,0) within grub gave me an "filesystem unknown, type 83" error.

Then I tried mkreiserfs --format 3.5. Nice option, but it didn't work out for me. Grub still outputs the same error.

Before going back to ext2/3 on my boot partition, I gave the 1.2 install CD a try. And I've used mkreiserfs from that CD. Then I did a reboot with 1.4 and YES, it works. Grub detects the filesystem.

But then another problem showed up. Grub couldn't find stage1, stage2 and reiserfsStage1_5. DOH! It wasn't installed on my boot partition yet, but that's what I was trying to do. (with 1.2 grub installed automagically those files on /boot).
On the cdimage /boot there are all those stages of Grub so I've manually copied them to /boot/grub.........and yep, it works.

Now I can start my all new Gentoo Linux 1.4rc1 with reiserfs totally optimized for my laptop.

But I haven't figured out why Grub didn't install those stages by itself and why the --format 3.5 didn't make any difference.....but the old mkreiserfs did. Maybe the new reiserfstools aren't that mature yet....

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JohnUdo · n00b Joined: 06 Nov 2002 Posts: 3 Location: Denmark

it worked for me when I simply emerged the new grub-0.92 you can find it in /usr/portage/sys-apps/grub - but not by searching with emerge -s
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Malakin · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2002 11:25 pm Post subject:

pilla · Posted: Wed Nov 13, 2002 11:55 pm Post subject:

Maybe it is just a shot in the dark, but how does grub recognizes partition type? Does it get the info from the partition table or from some magic number?

Maybe we could have two guys to post the output of their fdisk for a reiserfs partition, one that made grub work and another that didn t.

davasoft420 · n00b Joined: 08 Nov 2002 Posts: 28 Location: Tampa, FL

So this will work cus i am having probs witht this too:

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Comments by rac and plate seem to suggest that it will.
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blumley · n00b Joined: 16 Nov 2002 Posts: 4

It worked for me

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