We've been having a spot of bother with update-grub not working on our Debian Xen guests since upgrading them to squeeze.

The symptom: update-grub (as run after the installation of a new kernel package) fails because it's 'unable to find [a] GRUB drive for /dev/sda2 - check your device.map'. This happens using both grub-legacy and the new grub-pc package.

You'll probably have run into this if your guests were created using xen-tools.

Skipping over the related bugs, the long and short of it seems to be:

  • The way Xen pokes /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 (which are probably LVMs on your dom0) into your guests without a corresponding block device confuses grub
  • grub used to be dumb enough to ignore the mysterious presence of 'partitions' with no block device and carry on anyway
  • The versions in Debian Squeeze are just clever enough to be dangerous and fall over in this situation

Happily, we've worked out the fix. Grub is hard-coded to do the right thing in this situation if your disk devices are called '/dev/xvd[a-z]', so you need to:

  1. Fix all references to '/dev/sda2' to read '/dev/xvda' (and /dev/sda1 to /dev/xvdb). In practice this means grub's menu.lst and possibly your /etc/fstab if that isn't by UUID
  2. Edit the /etc/xen/guest-name file on the dom0 to rename the partitions (change the 'root' specifier and the lines in the 'disk' list)
  3. Destroy (sudo xm destroy) your guest. Note that you must destroy and recreate it; rebooting won't give Xen a chance to rename the devices.
  4. Bring it up again with xm create -c config-file
  5. Profit.