Debian 6.0 and Xen PyGrub failure

Question

On my VPS (running Debian 6.0 on Xen with PyGrub) I get the following error when trying to upgrade the system:

Searching for GRUB installation directory ... found: /boot/grub
warning: grub-probe can't find drive for /dev/xvda1.
grub-probe: error: cannot find a GRUB drive for /dev/xvda1.  Check your device.map.

I googled and found this solution:

echo '(hd0) /dev/xvda' > /boot/grub/device.map
mknod /dev/xvda b 202 0

Apparently that only works on older systems and not on my server.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Had the same problem, and that solution also did not work me.

Here's what worked at last:

echo '(hd0) /dev/xvdb' > /boot/grub/device.map
mknod /dev/xvdb b 202 0

(It didn't work with xvda for me.) Then edit /usr/sbin/grub-update and find

find_device ()
{
        if ! test -e ${device_map} ; then
                echo quit | grub --batch --no-floppy --device-map=${device_map} > /dev/null
        fi
        grub-probe --device-map=${device_map} -t device $1 2> /dev/null
}

and replace with

find_device ()
{
        if ! test -e ${device_map} ; then
                echo quit | grub --batch --no-floppy --device-map=${device_map} > /dev/null
        fi
        # grub-probe --device-map=${device_map} -t device $1 2> /dev/null
        echo /dev/xvdb
}

Run

apt-get upgrade

Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst with

sed -i "s/xvdb/xvda1/g" /boot/grub/menu.lst

Reboot.

Make a note of the changes made :)