Bug#601974: grub-probe can not find /dev/xvda1 (block device inside XEN)

[Ian Campbell]

On Wed, 2011-01-26 at 14:31 -0300, Sebastian Cruz wrote: 
> Package: grub-pc
> Severity: normal
> 
> 
> I had the same issue on several DomUs over different Dom0s. I've just
> tried installing grub-pc and grub-common from unstable (1.98
> +20100804-14_amd64) and the problem persisted.
> 
> Right after that I installed both packages from experimental
> (1.99~rc1-1_amd64) and I could correctly install grub and update-grub
> works as expected, though it outputs lots of warnings.
> 
> For further reference:
> 
> # grub-probe --device /dev/xvda1
> grub-probe: warn: disk does not exist, so falling back to partition
> device /dev/xvda1. 
> ext2

Are you by any chance using the Xen configuration style where each
partition is a separate backend device? (as opposed to listing the whole
disk scheme which contains a partition table).

If you are then I think this is expected since you will find that you
really do only have /dev/xvda[1-N] but no /dev/xvda.

So long as you only care about using pygrub to boot your pv guests, as
opposed to switching to HVM mode and using proper-grub-pc from the MBR,
then I think the warning can simply be ignored.

Otherwise my recommendation would be to transition to the whole disk
scheme if this bothers you. Although the split partition scheme is not
deprecated by Xen as such it does tend to cause these sorts of knock-on
effects on other non-Xen aware parts of the system.

Ian.

-- 
Ian Campbell

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
		-- Albert Einstein
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