problems with V0.95 and cciss (maybe) devices

[Mark Seger]

This isn't so much a bug with grub as a bug with how it's being used as 
part of another environment, specifically SystemImager.  Awhile ago I 
found some problems I was able to work around, but those work-arounds 
were for 0.93 and now that I'm using RedHat EL4, which ships with grub 
0.95, new problems have shown up and I can't tell from grubs diagnostics 
what's wrong.  I'm hoping that someone may be able to at least point me 
in the right direction to figure out what's wrong.  I'm not running grub 
directly, but rather running grub-install.

I've managed to track it down to the part where grub-install inspects 
some files with 'dump' command of the form:

grub-install --device-map /boot/grub/device.map <<EOF
dump (hd0,2)/boot/grub/stage1 filename
quit
EOF

and it blows up with an  error 'selected disk does not exist'.  To 
futher verify the problem I simply went into the grub shell and entered 
the dump command manually.  Same thing.  I even tried some other 
commands that take a device name as an argument and they all give me the 
same error.

If I go back to the system that has a running copy of RHEL4, these 
commands all work just fine.  So it would appear to me there is 
something about the environment that grub expects to be there that isn't 
or is broken.

Now for the real clue -- if I go into the grub shell on the running 
system and type 'dump (' followed by a TAB, it completes the command by 
filling in 'hd' and shows me there are 2 devices to choose from.  If I 
try the same thing on the machine I'm trying to instal when I hit the 
TAB all it does is echo the command.  So the question then becomes where 
does grub get the information for command completion and why wouldn't 
that same information not be available to a cloned system - the key here 
is that cloned system is simply running a minimal linux kernal and has 
copied the image to a disk partition to which it 'chroot's and then 
executes grub-install.

Is my explanation clear enough?  Do I need to supply more information?  
Any thoughts?

-mark