:GRUB vs. the Inodes: Who Needs a Bootable System, Anyway?
GRUB vs. the Inodes: Who Needs a Bootable System, Anyway? May 1, 2008, 20 :15 UTC (3 Talkback[s]) (8293 reads) (Other stories by Carla Schroder)
"Users of GRUB legacy, which is version 0.97, are getting bitten by an e2fsprogs incompatibility that renders their systems unbootable. e2fsprogs is the utilities package for the Ext3 filesystem, so it doesn't affect other filesystems. As this Ubuntu bug report states:
"'e2fsprogs ≥ 1.40.5 creates ext3 filesystems with 256 byte large inodes by default (in contrast to 128 byte used before), to accommodate for further ext4 related changes... Using any of these new features requires updating the bootsector of your system. Bootsectors written by 'grub' or earlier versions of 'grub-gfxboot' are not able to boot or even access partitions using any of these new features...!"
