#809353 grub-pc: Wheezy's recently pushed grub package fails sometimes

Package:
grub-pc
Source:
grub2
Description:
GRand Unified Bootloader, version 2 (PC/BIOS version)
Submitter:
CJ Fearnley
Date:
2015-12-29 18:57:10 UTC
Severity:
important
#809353#5
Date:
2015-12-29 18:46:17 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer,

Grub has been working flawlessly on all 50 or so Debian systems that I
maintain. I have been running grub-install manually after kernel updates
to ensure all disks in the RAID array have a bootable disk. Yesterday and
today I upgraded grub with apt-get upgrade to apply the latest security
patches for Wheezy in the grub-pc_1.99-27+deb7u3_amd64.deb package.

This was the result:

Setting up grub-pc (1.99-27+deb7u3) ...
Configuring grub-pc
-------------------

The GRUB boot loader was previously installed to a disk that is no longer
present, or whose unique
identifier has changed for some reason. It is important to make sure that the
installed GRUB core
image stays in sync with GRUB modules and grub.cfg. Please check again to make
sure that GRUB is
written to the appropriate boot devices.

If you're unsure which drive is designated as boot drive by your BIOS, it is
often a good idea to
install GRUB to all of them.

Note: it is possible to install GRUB to partition boot records as well, and
some appropriate
partitions are offered here. However, this forces GRUB to use the blocklist
mechanism, which makes
it less reliable, and therefore is not recommended.

  1. /dev/sda (500107 MB; WDC_WD5003ABYX-01WERA1)  4. /dev/sdd (500107 MB;
WDC_WD5003ABYX-01WERA1)
  2. /dev/sdb (500107 MB; WDC_WD5003ABYX-01WERA1)  5. /dev/dm-0 (9999 MB;
ccs5a-root)
  3. /dev/sdc (500107 MB; WDC_WD5003ABYX-01WERA1)

(Enter the items you want to select, separated by spaces.)

GRUB install devices: 1 2
/usr/sbin/grub-probe: error: no such disk.
Auto-detection of a filesystem of /dev/mapper/ccs5a-root failed.
Try with --recheck.
If the problem persists please report this together with the output of
"/usr/sbin/grub-probe --device-map="/boot/grub/device.map" --target=fs -v
/boot/grub" to <bug-grub@gnu.org>
/usr/sbin/grub-probe: error: no such disk.
Auto-detection of a filesystem of /dev/mapper/ccs5a-root failed.
Try with --recheck.
If the problem persists please report this together with the output of
"/usr/sbin/grub-probe --device-map="/boot/grub/device.map" --target=fs -v
/boot/grub" to <bug-grub@gnu.org>
GRUB failed to install to the following devices:

/dev/sda /dev/sdb

Manually running grub-install also fails:

lfcjf@ccs5:~$ sudo grub-install --no-floppy /dev/sda
/usr/sbin/grub-probe: error: no such disk.
Auto-detection of a filesystem of /dev/mapper/ccs5a-root failed.
Try with --recheck.
If the problem persists please report this together with the output of
"/usr/sbin/grub-probe --device-map="/boot/grub/device.map" --target=fs -v
/boot/grub" to <bug-grub@gnu.org>

It seems grub-probe is getting confused by / on LVM. As I said, there
have been countless kernel upgrades where the previous version of grub
worked flawlessly.

The other system that failed was a kvm VM. If I have time next week,
I'll send a followup report on it. But it is not a production system
and so I'm not spending time on it today.

So far, I have not figured out a workaround. If I do, I'll followup.