Comment 2 for bug 260001

My suspicion was wrong. It failed again when the grub partition was
mounted. I then tried using the alternate cd, but the install of grub
failed, although I couldn't see why.

Finally, I tried to recover the system using the alternate CD and
update-initramfs. I manually added the new kernel to
/boot/grub/menu.list and rebooted...

The "new" grub menu showed me the new image, but when I tried to boot it
it failed with "Error 2: Bad file or directory type".

I found this handy tutorial:

http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/6480/1/

... and tune2fs showed me that the inode size on my new partition was
256 bytes. I booted the intrepid alternate CD and checked the version of
grub - 0.97. Bingo! This version of grub does not support the 256 byte
inodes created by the version of mke2fs used by the intrepid install CD.

I reformatted the target partition with 128 byte inodes and ran the
installation again from the intrepid desktop CD, using manual
partitioning but preventing the root partition from being formatted....
the install crashed again!!

I booted the alternate CD and went to recover the broken system... the
inode size was still 128. I setup and ran update-initramfs again. I
edited /boot/grub/menu.list to put the new UUID into the appropriate
entries.

Try to boot the new partition... grub error 15: file not found.
Discovered a typo in menu.list - the root for the new system should have
been the shared /boot partition, but I had pointed it at the new
intrepid partition. Try again...

The intrepid system booted OK from the grub menu. Problem bypassed.

conclusion... IF intrepid is going to use grub 0.97, then it had better
format partitions with 128 byte inodes or there will be a lot of
heartaches when ordinary people start using it!

over and out.

Brian