"GRUB loading, please wait"
followed by:
"Error 2"
and no further action. This last message looks suspiciously like an
error message from the NetBSD bootloader, but I have no idea why that
would be.
Note that (a) this is with a single large (80GB) root partition
(which works just fine for me on at least four other systems)
Yes, it can work. It depends on where the kernels (and I guess grub
files ) are located on disk. Do a fresh install and immediatly install
xen kernels and grub, it may work because FFS will allocate blocks
near
the beggining of the disk: ffs tries to allocates inodes near the
parent's inode, and blocks near the inode. / has inode 2, so
everything in
/ or /grub will not be far away at this stage.
start working, install packages, etc ... the first cylinder groups
will
fill up. intall a new kernel in / (either a new inode, or
overwriting an
existing inode with a larger file), there's no free blocks in the
first
cylinder groups and your file ends up with blocks away from the
beggining
of disk. And grub can't load it.
Now if you do some filesystem activity before setting up grub, it's
possible
that /grub itself is too far from the start of disk and can't be
loaded
by the first stage grub.
So: never make a FFS larger than 512Mo if you want it to play well
with
grub.