Grub failing to read newest grub.conf [Solved]

Question

I have been working on installing archlinux and xen to run a xenserver with archlinux as my dom0. The installation of the grub went fine. A potential problem was me trying to install grub to my boot partition the first time on accident. Following are the commands I used to install grub.
# grub-install /dev/sda1
As you'd expect, I was informed that installing this way was a bad idea, and that the installation would not continue. I meant to use the following command instead:
# grub-install /dev/sda
Which completed successfully.
After that, I created the grub.conf
# grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.config
Completed successfully.
The actual output of these commands are exactly what I would have expected from them. If desired, I can post the output, but they were what would be expected form a successfully completed command.
After running through the installation and creation of the grub.conf file, I rebooted and was presented with the grub menu selection screen. While the xen entry was certainly found and put in the grub.conf (which I checked afterwords), there were only two entries: Archlinux and Archlinux booting from the backup ramfs. Thinking that this may have been the correct behavior for a server that is running a baremetal hypervisor, I choose the normal Archlinux entry and was greeted with an error screen informing me that a UUID for a partition that does not exist was not able to be found. Trying the bakup archlinux entry gave me the same result.
I am now unable to boot the system. Rebooting into live media, remounting partitions, arch-chroot into the /mnt directory, and reinstalling grub and recreating the grub.conf file has gotten me nowhere.I have several questions about this:
Is it possible that the UUIDs and grub.conf from my previous install could have been preserved somehow? The previous install used gpt partitioning while this one used mbr.
Is there something that I am missing to get grub to create the file and use it?
Do special procedures have to be followed to clear gpt formatted disks before using mbr?
Last edited by ephreal (2015-03-15 05:42:40)

Answer 1

Having no luck, I looked into syslinux a bit and gave it a try, and am now booting just fine. This doesn't solve the initial issue of having grub consistently show the wrong UUID, but it is a workaround.
Thank you Head_On_A_Stick for the clarification.
EDIT: The information for setting up xen with syslinux was found here and here. I'd just like to remind anyone using syslinux for the first time that the default root partition is /dev/sda3 and has to be changed in the config file. Got me 5 times in a row!
Last edited by ephreal (2015-03-15 05:52:24)