Bug#615893: grub-common: menu crashes and lvm/md disks detected incorrectly

[Craig Small]

Package: grub-common
Version: 1.99~rc1-3
Severity: critical
Justification: breaks the whole system

I apologise if this is a duplicate.  I didn't get a response from the
BTS and cannot find my bug anywhere.  I suspect I killed off the
reportbug before I sent it.

In short, this is what is going wrong:
  * My disks are being incorrectly detected
  * A reboot halts at cannot find /init
  * The grub menu crashes if the lines are too long

I have my root drive on a LVM partition called elmo-root and /boot is on
(md0).  While some of the grub setup clauses such as 00_header and
05_debian_theme have the right disks, 10_linux sets the root to md0 and
detects the UUID of md0 too.  This plainly does not work too well at
boot time.

I tried editing the boot parameters by selecting one of them and typing
'e' at the grub boot menu.  As I had to tell where init was I tried
appending init=/sbin/init to the line starting with linux.  The PC reset
when it got to a certain line length (a wrapped line plus 2 characters).
It didn't matter what I typed, including rubbish, it died at the same point.

I got around this problem by going to the grub prompt and doing the
following:
    insmod raid,mdraid09,part_msdos
    search --set=root -l root (detected correct elmo-root LVM)
    linux (md0)/vmlinuz....   init=/sbin/init (must be not too long!!)
    initrd (md0)/initrd.....
    boot

That consistently works, but it is a pain as if the system boots by
itself, it hangs.

 - Craig

-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages grub-common depends on:
ii  base-files              6.1              Debian base system miscellaneous f
ii  dpkg                    1.15.8.10        Debian package management system
ii  gettext-base            0.18.1.1-3       GNU Internationalization utilities
ii  install-info            4.13a.dfsg.1-6   Manage installed documentation in 
ii  libc6                   2.11.2-12        Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libdevmapper1.02.1      2:1.02.63-1      The Linux Kernel Device Mapper use
ii  libfreetype6            2.4.4-1          FreeType 2 font engine, shared lib
ii  zlib1g                  1:1.2.3.4.dfsg-3 compression library - runtime

Versions of packages grub-common recommends:
ii  os-prober                     1.44       utility to detect other OSes on a 

Versions of packages grub-common suggests:
pn  grub-emu                      <none>     (no description available)
pn  multiboot-doc                 <none>     (no description available)
pn  xorriso                       <none>     (no description available)

-- no debconf information