I've filed the text below as Bug 837430 - No grub2 menu; can't boot new F17 installation
But since the grub2 developers are probably overwhelmed at this point, and since folks on this list are usually very helpful, I'll post it here too. If anyone has seen this problem, or even better, has a solution, I'd like to know. ***************** There are so many major faults with grub2 it's hard to see where to begin. The most egregious are these: 1 - Instead of presenting a menu, my 64 bit machine displays an error message box "Input not supported" which steps diagonally up the screen. After about 30 sec the machine boots into some randomly chosen kernel. 2 - Most of the menuitems in /boot/grub2/grub.cfg are constructed incorrectly; only a few of them can possibly start a properly functioning system. Taken together, it is nearly impossible to boot a new Fedora 17 system. Item 1 means there's no way to choose among the various kernels and item 2 means the chance of hitting a working menuitem is slim to none. My standard procedure over many Fedora generations is to freshly install into alternating root partitions, keeping all the others intact. On this target machine I have /dev/sda1 /boot /dev/sda5 /f16 /dev/sda6 / /dev/sda7 /home /dev/sda8 /b1 /dev/sda9 swap /dev/sdb1 /h1 After completing installation of F17, /boot contained four kernels: vmlinuz-3.3.4-5.fc17.x86_64 vmlinuz-3.3.6-3.fc16.x86_64 vmlinuz-3.3.7-1.fc16.x86_64 vmlinuz-3.4.2-1.fc16.x86_64 Commonsense dictates that grub2 would present exactly four choices. Instead it constructs 14! These consist of all combinations of the four kernels with the two root partitions, with a couple of useless "Recovery" items for good measure. This is utter nonsense. If I can figure out which kernel is associated with which root partition, so can grub2. At "first boot", the machine booted an old F16 kernel combined with the new root partition. Unsurprisingly, nothing worked - no network, a very short list of modules - no way to continue with the installation, eg, yum update and yum install <others>. After much head-scratching and knashing of teeth I discovered the problem, and hand-edited /boot/grub2/grub.cfg (despite the injunction) and commented out all the garbage, leaving only the intended menuitem as the first. I also set default=0. With fingers crossed, I typed reboot which, as F17 is prone to do, froze the machine. After the necessary Reset, again there was no visible grub2 menu, but it correctly booted the new vmlinuz-3.3.4-5.fc17.x86_64. Networking worked and I was able to continue with yum update and the rest of the installation. This gave a new kernel - vmlinuz-3.4.4-3.fc17.x86_64 - and I was pleasantly surprised to see the new grub.cfg had a new entry inserted before all the rest, with all my edits retained, including set default=0, so I expected it to boot the new first menuitem correctly. Wrong! It booted the old vmlinuz-3.3.4-5.fc17.x86_64. Evidently, setting default=0 is no longer effective. This was fixed by more editing of grub.cfg, removing the old first menuitem for vmlinuz-3.3.4-5.fc17.x86_64*. Now I have a system that can only boot vmlinuz-3.4.4-3.fc17.x86_64 because there's no way to choose anything else. But at least it boots something!!! Some possibly relevant machine info: /proc/cpuinfo: model name : AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 840 Processor lspci: 00:0d.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation C61 [GeForce 7025 / nForce 630a] (rev a2) Although it has an nvidia video card, I haven't yet gotten around to installing kmod-nvidia. Clearly, something is hosed up with grub2's use of font, but I can't see how it works or how to fix it. On another x86_64 machine, and two i386 machines F17 grub2 displays its menu correctly, except for its brain-dead contruction of menuitems that cannot possibly work. -- David A. De Graaf DATIX, Inc. Hendersonville, NC d...@datix.us www.datix.us "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." (Pablo Picasso) -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org