Re: [CentOS-virt] Centos 5.5 KVM GRUB / Virtio issue

On 01/12/2011 02:04 PM, Ken Bass wrote:

More info...After comparing my working system with the non-working one. I notice the non-working ext3 filesystem has an inode size of 256. The working system 128. Could this be the issue with grub? I see some ramblings on the Internet about grub and inode size issues.

This was the problem. When I created the ext3 filesystem in the Fedora 14 host for the Centos 5.5 guest, it must have used 256 byte inodes. GRUB did not like this. After formatting to 128 byte inodes (mkfs.ext3 -I 128), GRUB works. Not only did grub work, but I was able to boot using a rescue disk and issue the

device (hd0) /dev/vda root (hd0,0) setup (hd0)

sequence to install GRUB properly without any loopback tricks in the host.