For more introduction to this bug, see the debian bug report at: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=463123 Basically, e2fsprogs 1.40.5 added some new entries to /etc/mke2fs.conf, including: inode_size = 256 Which means that any newly-created ext[23] filesystem will have 256-byte inodes instead of the previous default of 128. However, grub1 does not recognize this kind of filesystem and fails to boot. I understand that 256-byte inodes are more desirable than keeping up with legacy grub, but the e2fsprogs-1.40.6 ebuild was marked stable (at least on x86 and amd64) a couple weeks ago which means that all 2007.0 boxes in the field right now are in a broken state (well not ALL, but everybody who compulsively run etc-update after every emerge :). Newly created filesystems will not boot (nor can you even install stage[12] files from these partitions into the MBR). The debian bugreport has a grub patch that supposedly makes it compatible with 256 inodes, but if that cannot make it into gentoo in the short term, a new e2fsprogs ebuild needs to be released that patches /etc/mke2fs.conf to remove the newly-introduced inode_size feature.
This seems to be the same issue that was addressed in bug 214563 . If so, then sys-boot/grub-0.97-r5 should already contain the fix needed for this since 2008-03-25. Of course this does not help those of us running stable for a while, as the final patchset for that version appears to be waiting for a resolution to bug 215799 so it is unlikely to get stabled for some time.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 214563 ***
