Fedora 20 x64 and Grub2/mbr

[Somebeachsomewhere]

As is covered here http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=280 followed the instructions to a tee. Don't know if it makes a difference but in Fedora 20 x64 I used the install DVD. For Fedora 20 following the above kb article was flawless until step 28. There is no quit button at the bottom right. The only option is reboot. Since step 28 has a warning about "Do not reboot" in bold (for very good reasons) I stopped here. I pressed Ctrl+Alt+F2 to get to a terminal. There is no "Activities" either as step 29 suggests. From the terminal I followed steps 30 to 35. All worked, no error message. Rebooting and all was as it should be. BooItBM was still active and Fedora 20 booted. However, there was no graphic display for Grub2 just a black screen with the words Fedora highlighted and a 5 second countdown at the bottom. Fedora booted up ok but there was no splash screen. I checked Grub2 in Fedora 20 and there was no /etc/default/grub file at all (there is supposed to be one by default) So apparently by not installing a bootloader until after installation completes, some of the Grub2 configuration files are not created. I had a backup of Fedora 19 x64 and copied over the /etc/default/grub file (using TBIview) to a flash drive then as root copying this file into the default location. Everything now works. However, is there any way that I can setup Grub2 properly after installation so the /etc/default/grub is created and I have a default splash screen appear as Fedora 20 x64 boots up? I don't care about the Grub2 graphics since I set the timeout in Grub to 0 once I know it's working, but I would like the default splash screen to appear as Fedora boots up.

[TeraByte Support(TP)]

That will be looked at when we update the KB article for Fedora 20. There's an alternate way to do that install procedure that should take care of those issues. It would be more cumbersome to follow, but may be necessary now with Fedora 20.

For now, if you still don't have the splash screen (not sure from reading your post): With the /etc/default/grub file that you copied over still in place, try running the following command from a terminal window (as root) to rewrite the grub.cfg file:

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

...and then reboot normally, and see if the splash screen appears.

[Somebeachsomewhere]

Thank you. Sorry to not mention it but I do have the splash screen after restoring from the backup with TBIview, but if I didn't have that I wouldn't know how to get it using the KB article.

[Somebeachsomewhere]

You may wish to include a caveat about swap in the above mentioned support article. I have not limited primaries in BootITBM with several Linux installs. Installation of Debian and Fedora will format swap. If your partitions are setup using UUID's some Linux installs will hang for several minutes searching for a now missing UUID that formatting swap has changed. Mint and Ubuntu don't seem to be affected as badly but Mageia hangs for several minutes (others may as well). Before installing Debian and Fedora I removed the swap entry from the MBR details. You'll receive a warning that swap has not been setup when installing either Debian or Fedora but it will work (at least if you have enough ram) Once into the new install you'll need to edit fstab to include the swap UUID. Once that's done reboot and include swap in the MBR details of BootITBM.
Conversely you can wait if your Linux install is affected and edit the fstab file to point to the new UUID that formatting swap has created.

[DrTeeth]

On Sat, 21 Dec 2013 05:54:15 PST, just as I was about to take a herb,
Somebeachsomewhere disturbed my reverie and wrote:

>Conversely you can wait if your Linux install is affected and edit the fstab file to point to the new UUID that formatting swap has created.

There are soooo many Linux distros that do NOT insist on formatting an
existing swap file, I just avoid those that do.

An alternative would be to have those distros to have their own swap
files to avoid having to mess about with the fstab file.
--

Cheers,

DrT

** Stress - the condition brought about by having to
** resist the temptation to beat the living daylights
** out of someone who richly deserves it.

[Somebeachsomewhere]

An article was posted by Terabyte about installing Fedora 20 using the Live Desktop. However, I have the install DVD and some of the steps outlined cannot be followed. See my previous post. Again I would like to ask how do I get the splash screen to show upon bootup? Terabyte support indicated there were some ways of doing this but the Fedora 20 article doesn't provide any hint about this.

[TeraByte Support(TP)]

Somebeachsomewhere wrote:
> An article was posted by Terabyte about installing Fedora 20 using the Live
> Desktop. However, I have the install DVD and some of the steps outlined
> cannot be followed. See my previous post. Again I would like to ask how do
> I get the splash screen to show upon bootup? Terabyte support indicated
> there were some ways of doing this but the Fedora 20 article doesn't
> provide any hint about this.

The full DVD install has not been reviewed/tested yet. A separate article may be needed for that. For now, a note will be added that the procedure does not apply when using the full DVD.

You will get the splash screen if you follow the current procedure, which allows the installer to install Grub to the MBR (along with backing up & restoring the 1st track).

[Somebeachsomewhere]

Followed this http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=280 for the install DVD. Only a few minor modifications need to be made to apply it to the install DVD, the most important of which is pressing Ctrl+Alt+F2 to get to a terminal and Ctrl+Alt+F7 to get back to the graphical installation.
All went fine with the Fedora 20x64 install. However, when I went to re-boot into Windows 7 x32 I received a message from Bootit BM "the partition is not bootable". I do not have a recovery partition, just a straight NTFS partition as my first partition on HD0. All my other Windows installations were unaffected (Vista and XP) and no Linux installations were affected either.
I can only assume that installing Grub2 to the MBR overwrote the Windows bootloader. This was even after I created a Bootit BM UFD as outlined in the kb article. No errors were reported creating it. No errors were reported after restoring with the Bootit BM UFD from the Fedora 20 desktop.
How does Fedora "see" the EMBR partition so that using the UFD to restore Bootit BM works or does it need to? Should I have included the Bootit BM partition in the MBR details before attempting to restore Bootit BM with the UFD at the Fedora desktop? Primaries are not being limited.
Fortunately, I completed a full disk backup using IFW 2.87 prior to doing anything and restored Windows 7 and the Bootit BM EMBR partition. All is now OK but why did this happen?

[TeraByte Support(TP)]

Somebeachsomewhere wrote:
> As is covered here http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=280
> followed the instructions to a tee. Don't know if it makes a difference but
> in Fedora 20 x64 I used the install DVD. For Fedora 20 following the above
> kb article was flawless until step 28. There is no quit button at the
> bottom right. The only option is reboot. Since step 28 has a warning about
> "Do not reboot" in bold (for very good reasons) I stopped here. I
> pressed Ctrl+Alt+F2 to get to a terminal. There is no
> "Activities" either as step 29 suggests. From the terminal I
> followed steps 30 to 35. All worked, no error message. Rebooting and all
> was as it should be. BooItBM was still active and Fedora 20 booted.
> However, there was no graphic display for Grub2 just a black screen with
> the words Fedora highlighted and a 5 second countdown at the bottom.
> Fedora booted up ok but there was no splash screen. I checked Grub2 in
> Fedora 20 and there was no /etc/default/grub file at all (there is supposed
> to be one by default) So apparently by not installing a bootloader until
> after installation completes, some of the Grub2 configuration files are not
> created. I had a backup of Fedora 19 x64 and copied over the
> /etc/default/grub file (using TBIview) to a flash drive then as root
> copying this file into the default location. Everything now works. However,
> is there any way that I can setup Grub2 properly after installation so the
> /etc/default/grub is created and I have a default splash screen appear as
> Fedora 20 x64 boots up? I don't care about the Grub2 graphics since I set
> the timeout in Grub to 0 once I know it's working, but I would like the
> default splash screen to appear as Fedora boots up.

What probably happened was that your first partition starts at LBA 63 on that disk, and since you did not include it in the Fedora boot item, Fedora didn't see any partition there and overwrote it when it installed Grub2 to the MBR. Grub2 can use over 100 sectors in some cases - it varies by distribution. I'll test this to verify it's what happened, and if so, update the procedure (this wouldn't happen if the disk was using 2k alignment since the first partition would start at LBA 2048.

On the test installs here, the Fedora splash screen did appear, and /etc/default/grub was created automatically during the install. The /etc/default/grub file is created by the installer, and can be different depending on the install configuration. The grub graphics screen didn't show up, but that doesn't have anything to do with the KB article procedure, since it's doing the same thing (installing grub to MBR) as it would if you were not using BIBM at all.

Edit: In reference to that last sentence, I always got the text-based grub screen right from the first boot when grub was still installed in the MBR, meaning that this is also what a non-BIBM install would look like. I just assumed that this was by design in the case of the Live CD version of the installer, and the grub graphics screen could be added later by installing additional packages, etc.

[TeraByte Support(TP)]

TeraByte Support(TP) wrote:

> What probably happened was that your first partition starts at LBA 63 on that disk,
> and since you did not include it in the Fedora boot item, Fedora didn't see any
> partition there and overwrote it when it installed Grub2 to the MBR. Grub2 can use
> over 100 sectors in some cases - it varies by distribution. I'll test this to verify
> it's what happened, and if so, update the procedure (this wouldn't happen if the disk
> was using 2k alignment since the first partition would start at LBA 2048.
>

I did verify that when the first partition on the drive starts at LBA 63, and it's not included in the Fedora boot item, the installer will overwrite the beginning of that partition with Grub2 (it doesn't know the partition is there), which correlates with what you saw. The procedure has been updated to check for this situation, requiring that either the first partition on Drive 0 be included in the boot item, or use 2k alignment.