Grub error 17

Earlier this week, I moved offices (hooray!), which meant I had to move all my stuff.  Since I had just moved a few months ago when I changed jobs, I had things pretty well pared down, but it still took two trips in the Jeep to get my office mate and I moved across campus.  Everything went pretty well, though, until I tried to boot my desktop.  After the BIOS screen, the video went black for several seconds and then an ominous “Error 17” came up.  That was it, no other information.

Doing some research, I found that this is the error you get when grub thinks the partitions are out of order and freaks out.  So what the heck?  I burned a Knoppix CD because I left my boot USB at home and followed the instructions on this site.  One thing I noticed was that my sda2 partition overlapped with the two partitions around it. The last cylinder of sda1 was the same as the first cylinder of sda2, and the last cylinder of sda2 was the same as the first cylinder of sda3.  Since sda2 was just my /tmp partition, it was no big deal to re-size the partition so as to not stop on any toes and then create a new filesystem on it.

I have no idea how that happened, and I would expect that if it was an existing problem it would have made itself known when I rebooted for kernel updates. Maybe the cylinders got shaken up in the move?  I didn’t think they could do that.

Upgrading to Fedora 12 via yum

Since Fedora 12 was released yesterday, I decided I should go ahead an upgrade my Linux box at home from Fedora 11 to Fedora 12.  As I’ve done in the past, I used the Fedora Project wiki as reference to upgrade via yum.  Although it is not officially supported, it generally results in a shorter downtime than a standard re-install, and it allows me to do it remotely.

As in the past, I had to remove a few packages to make the dependencies work out.  This time around it was: krbafs-devel tigervnc-server krbafs gnome-bluetooth{,-libs} pulseaudio-module-bluetooth bluez

Then I ran into a different problem.  My /var partition ran out of space for the 1.4 GB that needed to be downloaded.  So I first ran `yum groupupdate Base` to update the basic packages and then `yum upgrade` to update everything else.

That’s when the trouble hit.  In the instructions, after yum has finished, you’re supposed to install grub.  I forgot to do that and rebooted immediately after yum was done.  I was a bit confused when the machine never came back up, so earlier today I burned a CD and went into rescue mode.  Initially, I could not get grub-install to work. I’m not sure what finally fixed it, but after several reboots and much straw-grasping, I got it working.

So now my machine is happy.  I just need to get NetworkManager to stop killing my resolv.conf