This problem is most often seen during an apt-get update or similar.
Issues in chroot
Mostly this is caused by some issues when running in a chroot. Before switching to the chroot, it's necessary to mount at least the /dev and /proc directories. However sometimes we've seen this issue even with these mounts properly configured.
In this example vm1 represens the device our system is running on; it could as easily have been /dev/sda1 or /dev/sdx4.
~ # mount /dev/vg0/vm1 /mnt/vm1 ~ # mount -o bind /dev /mnt/vm1/dev ~ # mount -o bind /dev/pts /mnt/vm1/dev/pts ~ # mount -o bind /proc /mnt/vm1/proc ~ # mount -o bind /run /mnt/vm1/run ~ # mount -o bind /sys /mnt/vm1/sys ~ # chroot /mnt/vm1 /bin/bash
Viewing grub-mkconfig Details
Run grub-mkconfig with debug spew to see details.
~ # sh -x /usr/sbin/grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
Work Arounds
If grub-probe still fails for you, even if properly entering chroot there is one last-ditch work-around.
The purpose of grub-probe is to simply output the file-system type for /.
So, in the worst case you can do this.
~ # mv /usr/sbin/grub-probe /usr/sbin/grub-probe.orig ~ # curl edoceo.com/pub/grub-probe.sh > /usr/sbin/grub-probe ~ # chmod 0755 /usr/sbin/grub-probe
Here we effectively replace the binary grub-probe with a shell script that simply echos a known good value.
Core of grub-probe
The grub-probe utility is a binary that does something like this.
- Examine
/proc/filesystems - Examine
/boot/grub/device.map - Probe
/dev/sd* - Examine
/proc/devices - Examine
/proc/self/mountinfo
From that information it will output the file-system type, device, file-system UUID which are fed to the grub-mkconfig