Re: Why the "--skip-fs-probe" option does not prevent file system check during installation?

[Andrey Borzenkov]

On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 12:09 PM, Wang Weber <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I failed to install grub-1.99

grub 1.99 is very old. Please use at least 2.00 or preferably recent
development snapshot.

> on a hard disk and I found the reason is
> because GRUB thought that there was a ext2 filesystem installed on that disk
> due to garbage data. The error messages are listed below.
>
> # grub-setup --directory=/mnt/root/mnt2/boot/grub /dev/sdc
> grub-setup: warn: Attempting to install GRUB to a disk with multiple
> partition labels or both partition label and filesystem.  This is not
> supported yet..
> grub-setup: warn: Embedding is not possible.  GRUB can only be installed in
> this setup by using blocklists.  However, blocklists are UNRELIABLE and
> their use is discouraged..
> grub-setup: error: will not proceed with blocklists.
>
> I also tried the following command and used gdb to confirm this.
>
> bash-3.00# grub-probe -t fs -d /dev/sdc
> ext2
>
> Then I checked the grub-setup help doc and saw that there is a
> "--skip-fs-probe" option. The description for this option is below.
>
>   -s, --skip-fs-probe        Do not probe for filesystems in DEVICE
>
> I tried this option but it still promoted the same error messages. Finally I
> checked the source code, it seems that this operation is not doing what I am
> expecting. It does not prevent GRUB from detecting the filesystem and GRUB
> refuses to do installation if some garbage data was found.
>
> Is this behavior correct? What's the workaround if I want GRUB to do the
> installation without checking the existence of filesystem?
>
> Thanks,
> Weber
>
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