Re: GRUB overwriting partition tables

[Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko]

> Thanks for the answer, and good to know that you see the problem.
>
> But, well. Both LILO and old GRUB support this configuration and it's
> a valid configuration as far as the tables themselves are concerned.
> If GRUB2 cannot support this, I consider that a regression. I know
> LILO a bit, but not old GRUB. Cannot GRUB2 handle this in whatever way
> GRUB does/did?
The way you refer to is called blocklists. Basically LILO saves a list
of sectors where its files are. This approach was an error from the
begining since filesystem has a complete right to move files to
another sectors. At first it was manageable because filesystems tended
to let files in place but there were a lot of situations where this
would lead to weird effect. E.g.
1) install grub-legacy
2) rm -rf /boot/grub/stage2
3) Reboot
It will boot even though stage2 was deleted because blocks still
contain stage2.
4) put stage2 to /boot/grub/stage2
Now your system looks completely ok but new stage2 is probably
residing in another blocks and after random amount of time it will
stop booting.
Now with advent of advanced filesystems blocklists may fail even if
you don't do anything because new filesystem use their right to move
files to other blocks
This is actually  situation of "pay now or pay later". We try not to
break configurations used in major distributions if possible and not
too much work to support them reliably. But you have used tools in a
way to force them to create a bad configuration. Don't expect us to
support this. Additionally your configuration has no benefit over
standard one. You say that it's easy to remember to recover after
failure. If you use sane configuration you'll have no failures. And
first partition starting at sector number  e.g. 1000 or 2000 isn't
more difficult to remember than it starting at sector 1. 1000 sectors
is only 500 KiB you probably won't miss them much but it gives grub2
enough space for a lot of things.
>
> Regards,
> Rene
>
>
>
>
> --
> Regards
> Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko
>
> Personal git repository: http://repo.or.cz/w/grub2/phcoder.git
>



-- 
Regards
Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko

Personal git repository: http://repo.or.cz/w/grub2/phcoder.git