[Sisuite-devel] oscar 5.1rc1 systemconfigurator&suse 10.3: grub fails due to empty device map

[Erik Jacobson]

Using oscar51.rc1 and opensuse 10.3, I hit an issue with
systemconfigurator (2.2.11-1).

After working around a different oscar default package list issue where the
kernel was not installed so the boot loader couldn't install, I hit another
problem where systemconfigurator tries to install the boot loader.

I tracked this down to the systemconfigurator call creating an empty
/boot/grub/device.map. When device.map is empty, the 'grub' command does
nothing.

You can confirm this by typing 'grub' in the imaging chroot yourself and finding
that you don't even get a grub> prompt.

Removing the device.map (forcing the grub command to make a new one) resolves
the issue for me.

So when I removed the device.map and re-ran the grub command that failed, I
was able to boot to the kernel at least (but hit an unrelated issue with
not having a valid disk driver in the initrd).

I didn't track down further why an empty device map was being created, but
I did confirm that if I removed the device map and re-ran
systemconfigurator that an empty device map would appear again.

I might be able to help debug this a bit further if this issue is interesting.