leapp: How to solve Risk Factor HIGH "GRUB core will be updated during upgrade"

Solution Verified - Updated

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and later
    • leapp

Issue

  • When upgrading a system from RHEL7 to RHEL8 or RHEL8 to RHEL9, the following Risk Factor is reported

    Risk Factor: high
Title: GRUB core will be updated during upgrade
Summary: On legacy (BIOS) systems, GRUB core (located in the gap between the MBR and the first partition) does not get automatically updated when GRUB is upgraded.
Key: baa75fad370c42fd037481909201cde9495dacf4

Resolution

This message is to remember that, on BIOS systems (i.e. non-UEFI), the Grub2 binary installed on the MBR of the hard disk and having its modules in /boot/grub2 directory is NOT updated when updating Grub2 packages.

Because of that, once the system got upgraded from RHEL7 to RHEL8 (or RHEL8 to RHEL9), it is recommended to install the Grub2 binary to the MBR again:

# grub2-install /dev/sda

Here above, the /dev/sda path needs to be adjusted to point to the hard disk used to boot the system (check the BIOS to know which hard disk is used).

Root Cause

The fact that Grub2 binary is not updated when updating Grub2 packages is tracked by This content is not included.BZ 2170430 - grub2-pc-modules updates are not applied to /boot/grub2/i386-pc directory.

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