after installing most recent kernel: /boot/grub disappeared?

SUSE Product Topics SLES Configure-Administer
1

Hi,
i have a system with SLES 11 SP4 64bit. I installed the most recent kernel because of the dirty-cow bug: 3.0.101-84.1
The installation was complaining about some missing files in the /boot/grub directory:

Perl-Bootloader: 2016-11-04 21:11:03 <3> pbl-4528.2 FileIO::ReadFile.90: Error: Failed to open /boot/grub/menu.lst: No such file or directory
Perl-Bootloader: 2016-11-04 21:11:03 <3> pbl-4528.2 FileIO::ReadFile.90: Error: Failed to open /boot/grub/device.map: No such file or directory
Perl-Bootloader: 2016-11-04 21:11:03 <3> pbl-4528.2 Core::GRUB::GrubDev2UnixDev.476: Error: did not find a match for hd0 in the device map
Perl-Bootloader: 2016-11-04 21:11:03 <3> pbl-4528.2 Core::GRUB::GrubDev2UnixDev.476: Error: did not find a match for hd0 in the device map

While checking for the missing files i found out that i don’t have a /boot/grub directory !!! I can’t remember deleting it. Why should i ?
In the history i don’t find anything like "rm -rfv /boot/grub or something similar.

I didn’t check if the directory is available before the installation of the new kernel.
So i’m not sure if the update removed it.

I’d like to ask if someone else experienced this ?

What i’m sure of is that last week i did several reboots which went fine. Without /boot/grub they surely wouldn’t have gone fine.
So last week /boot/grub must have been available. /boot is not on a seperate partition.
I did some testing with OCFS2 and tried to install some packages related to libvirt last week
I don’t see a relation to a deleted /boot/grub.

Bernd

2

Hi
Fire up YaST bootloader and check, it should create them again…

Not a UEFI booting system?

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° LFCS, SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
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3

Hi Malcom,
that’s clear. But the question is how could it dissapear ?
How can i recognize if it is an UEFI system ?

Bernd

4

Hi
If it’s UEFI booting (run the command efibootmgr) then it’s using elilo
and not grub. It should show whats being used in YaST Bootloader.

What file system in use, btrfs?

What partitions are present?

lsblk

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° LFCS, SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
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5

Hi
Another thought, was the system all up to date with patches etc, I
wonder if you missed a perl-bootloader update?

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° LFCS, SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
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6 
sunhb58820:~ # mount

/dev/mapper/vg1-lv_root on / type ext3 (rw,strictatime,acl,user_xattr)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
debugfs on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw)
udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,mode=1777)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,mode=0620,gid=5)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
securityfs on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw)
configfs on /sys/kernel/config type configfs (rw)
ocfs2_dlmfs on /dlm type ocfs2_dlmfs (rw)
/dev/dm-5 on /images type ocfs2 (rw,_netdev,heartbeat=local)
none on /var/lib/ntp/proc type proc (ro,nosuid,nodev)
sunhb58820:~ # efibootmgr -v
Fatal: Couldn't open either sysfs or procfs directories for accessing EFI variables.
Try 'modprobe efivars' as root.

Loading the module didn't suceed.
sunhb58820:~ # rpm -qa|grep -iE 'grub|lilo'
elilo-3.14-0.38.1
grub-0.97-162.172.1
sunhb58820:~ # elilo -tv
elilo: /etc/elilo.conf: failed to open: No such file or directory