Bug 160553

Summary:	grub-install hangs during install in the MBR
Product:	Gentoo Linux	Reporter:	Jens Hornung <mail>
Component:	[OLD] Core system	Assignee:	Gentoo's Team for Core System packages <base-system>
Status:	RESOLVED NEEDINFO
Severity:	normal
Priority:	High
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	x86
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description Jens Hornung 2007-01-06 19:24:36 UTC

I wanted to install gentoo with the LiveCD 2006.1 and tried the installation with the GTK-installer. My root-partition, on which resides the /boot-directory, is formated with xfs. The machine is an IBM X40 notebook. The installation hung while executing grub. There was ~50% CPU-load for grub and ~50% for the pygtk-installer. The next time I tried the text-mode installer. The same problem. The I tried the gtk-installer but without installation of grub. Succeded. But then I didn't have a boot manager and because it's the first time I installed gentoo I didn't have the experience to install it manually. So I've done the installation with the chroot-environment. The same problem with grub-install. I've waited about 60min. The last message was 'Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.'. Then I tried to install grub the manual way with the grub-console which was done in a few seconds.

It seems that grub-install often freezes with xfs. Perhaps it would be better to warn when using the installer and formatting the harddisk with xfs.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Using the gtk-installer
2. Format root (/boot) with xfs
3. Wait until grub-install is executed

Actual Results:  
grub-install freezes

Expected Results:  
grub-install should install the bootloader in the mbr to load an xfs-partition

Comment 1 SpanKY gentoo-dev

2007-01-07 01:45:15 UTC

so run it through strace and see what it's doing