Why After upgraded from Red Hat 5.7 to 5.8, still getting the old kernel ?
Environment
Red Hat Enterprise Linux - 5.8.
Kernel-2.6.18-274.12.1.el5.
Architecture - x86_64.
Issue
After upgrading one Linux server from Red Hat 5.7 to 5.8, but after reboot, still getting the old kernel rather grub file is getting updated with new kernel /boot/boot/grub/grub.conf.
Resolution
One possible workaround to the mentioned problem we have suggested which works as well
1) copy grub.conf or create a symbolic link will work.
but requirement is to remove /boot/boot/*. Reason behind this to have /boot/boot/* as /boot is itself a partition than all the path for /boot will be relative to /boot.
Now to remove /boot/boot we need to try following ways ..
1) take a backup of /boot/boot/grub/grub.conf -> /boot/grub.conf_old
2) remove rm /boot/boot/grub/grub.conf.
3) grub-install /dev/sdb (or as per your choice of drive)
4) reboot.
After this system will boot and stop at
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
will give you your default drive name but as its a relative path so actually it referring to /boot/boot/grub/stage1
now to remove /boot/boot
5) root (hd1, 0) (supposing it is sdb1)
6) setup --prefix=/grub/stage1 (hd1) (suppose we want to shift to /boot/grub/stag1 for this relative path would be /grub/stage1)
7) kernel (hd1,0)/vmlinux(you want to shift manually boot this time as we don't have grub.conf)
8) initrd (hd1,0)/initrd(respective initrd image).
9) boot
after booting up copy backup grub.conf to /boot/grub/ absolute path to boot up automatically..
Root Cause
From the feedback of the question
It seems that running the command on grub console have created the issue
grub>root (hd1,0) # setup (hd1) etc...
Which signifies change in the default grub root device. Seems to be the possible reason of the problem.
Diagnostic Steps
We have started our finding with following given questions..
1) Can we ask the customer did he tried to customised anything because /boot/boot is unusual to me.
2) Here we have one work around for the problem as by creating a soft link
ln -s <target> <source>.
cu might have tried following (mistakenly)..
grub-install /dev/vda1 --root-directory=/boot/
Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.
No suitable drive was found in the generated device map.
cat /boot/
boot/ initrd-2.6.18-274.el5.img symvers-2.6.18-308.4.1.el5.gz System.map-2.6.18-8.el5 .vmlinuz-2.6.18-308.el5.hmac
config-2.6.18-274.el5 initrd-2.6.18-308.4.1.el5.img symvers-2.6.18-308.el5.gz vmlinuz-2.6.18-274.el5 vmlinuz-2.6.18-8.el5
config-2.6.18-308.4.1.el5 initrd-2.6.18-308.el5.img symvers-2.6.18-8.el5.gz .vmlinuz-2.6.18-274.el5.hmac
config-2.6.18-308.el5 initrd-2.6.18-8.el5.img System.map-2.6.18-274.el5 vmlinuz-2.6.18-308.4.1.el5
config-2.6.18-8.el5 lost+found/ System.map-2.6.18-308.4.1.el5 .vmlinuz-2.6.18-308.4.1.el5.hmac
grub/ symvers-2.6.18-274.el5.gz System.map-2.6.18-308.el5 vmlinuz-2.6.18-308.el5
cat /boot/boot/grub/
device.map fat_stage1_5 iso9660_stage1_5 minix_stage1_5 stage1 ufs2_stage1_5 xfs_stage1_5
e2fs_stage1_5 ffs_stage1_5 jfs_stage1_5 reiserfs_stage1_5 stage2 vstafs_stage1_5
cat /boot/boot/grub/device.map
(fd0) /dev/fd0
cat /boot/grub/device.map
this device map was generated by anaconda
(hd0) /dev/vda
got errors as below:
grub> setup --prefix=/grub/stage1 (hd1)
setup --prefix=/grub/stage1 (hd1)
Checking if "/grub/stage1/stage1" exists... no --- pretty unusual to me
ls -l
total 186
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 75 Apr 5 11:21 device.map
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7584 Apr 5 12:00 e2fs_stage1_5
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7456 Apr 5 12:00 fat_stage1_5
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6720 Apr 5 12:00 ffs_stage1_5
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6720 Apr 5 12:00 iso9660_stage1_5
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8224 Apr 5 12:00 jfs_stage1_5
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6880 Apr 5 12:00 minix_stage1_5
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9248 Apr 5 12:00 reiserfs_stage1_5
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 512 Apr 5 12:00 stage1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 104988 Apr 5 12:00 stage2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7072 Apr 5 12:00 ufs2_stage1_5
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6272 Apr 5 12:00 vstafs_stage1_5
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8872 Apr 5 12:00 xfs_stage1_5
seems after booting up on the grub console system automatically searches the stage1 so the command should have followed
setup --prefix=/grub <default dir>
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