Fedora 45 Beta fails to boot after repeated installations on firmware RAID using the GTK installer

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Problem

Installing Fedora 45 Beta for a second (or any later) time on a system using firmware RAID (also known as BIOS RAID or fake RAID) may result in an unbootable installation even though the first installation booted correctly.

In the GRUB bootloader, an error like this is printed:

Booting 'Fedora Linux (7.2.0-61.fc45.x86_64) 45 (Forty Five Prerelease)'
error: ../../grub-core/loader/i386/pc/linux.c:grub_cmd_linux:170:invalid magic number.
error: ../../grub-core/loader/i386/pc/linux.c:grub_cmd_initrd:422:you need to load the kernel first.
Press any key to continue...

This problem only happens when the traditional GTK-based Anaconda installer (Server/Everything images) is used. It doesn’t happen with live desktop images (Workstation/KDE/etc) which use the WebUI-based Anaconda installer. It also does not occur for non-RAID disk setups.

Cause

Invalid caching code in blivet caused disk corruption.

Related Issues

Bugzilla report: #2530897

Upstream fix: https://github.com/storaged-project/blivet/pull/1514

Workarounds

Deleting and re-creating the firmware RAID array will make another (one) installation possible. However, re-creating the RAID array means destroying all previous data on that array. Only do this if you don’t mind losing all the data (or back up all important data first).

Alternatively, install a desktop Fedora from a Live image rather than from the Server/Everything image.

Alternatively, don’t use a firmware RAID array (but that again requires you to back up all important data you currently have there).

Alternatively, wait for Fedora 45 final release, where this could be hopefully fixed.

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You can discuss this issue in Ask Fedora .

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An update has been released to fix this issue in Fedora Linux 45.

After you update your system in your usual way (and possibly reboot), you should no longer be affected by this problem. If the problem persists, please start a new discussion topic and we’ll help figure out what’s still wrong.

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Please note that the Fedora 45 Beta images continue to be affected by this bug, but final Fedora 45 images will work correctly.