system unbootable with 0.95+cvs20040624-17ubuntu5

[PeterShinners]

I installed and upated the latest experimental GRUB. Afterwards the system was
unbootable. I'll try to give information here, but can followup with more
specific details.

The system boots to a blank screen. Where the regular grub menu appears I have a
blank screen with a fully locked system (ctrl-alt-del won't reboot).

My first attempt to fix this was to use a rescue disk (in my case a Suse 9.3
DVD) to try to reset the grub install. I pointed the root to my Breezy
partition. The system had the same locked boot.

My second attempt was to point the grub root to my old Hoary partition. With
this in place the grub menu was able to come up, and I could manually get it to
boot into the Breezy partition.

My system has two drives. /dev/hda is a single partition windows drive. /dev/hdb
is split between two "system" partitions, swap, and a large /home mount.
Currently the two system partitions contain Breezy and Hoary.

[Matthew Garrett (mjg59)]

Ok, that sounds like an issue with where grub gets installed rather than a bug
with the new grub.

[PeterShinners (pete-shinners)]

In all cases, grub is being installed to the /dev/hda MBR. I 'install' by
launching the grub shell and running

root (hd1,1) # this is my Breezy partition
setup (hd0)

[Matthew Garrett (mjg59)]

Right, I've reproduced that now. It should be fixed in the next upload.

[Matthew Garrett (mjg59)]

*** Bug 20184 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Matthew Garrett (mjg59)]

Ok, ubuntu6 has just been uploaded. Once it hits the archive, this should be
fixed. Let me know if you still have problems.

[Sami Haahtinen (ressu)]

Confirming that ubuntu6 fixes the problem on my configuration.

[PeterShinners (pete-shinners)]

With the 'ubuntu6' version I am having trouble getting setup. Grub is not seeing
any of my drives. I've included a copy of the interaction. This may be unrelated
to the previous problem, but this was working for me the last time I tried. I
also tried using the "--device-map /boot/grub/device.map". That didn't make any
difference other than startup time.

    GNU GRUB version 0.95 (640K lower / 3072K upper memory)

 [ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For the first word, TAB
   lists possible command completions. Anywhere else TAB lists the possible
   completions of a device/filename. ]

grub> root (hd1,1)

Error 21: Selected disk does not exist

grub> root (hd0,0)

Error 21: Selected disk does not exist

[PeterShinners (pete-shinners)]

Version 0.95+cvs20040624-17ubuntu7 still fails for me at boot. (I suspect I
wasn't running "sudo" the other day when trying to get grub configured.)

When the system boots I now get a blank screen, and after a short pause a single
smiley character is shown at the bottom center of the screen. It is the "hollow"
smiley, not the "solid" one. The system seems hung at this point.

[Alvin Thompson (alvint-deactivatedaccount)]

i have the exact same problem as the previous comment (smiley face). even
manually reinstalling grub from the grub prompt doesn't work. i also tried the
suse 9.3 rescue disk version as well. i wound up having to reinstall.

nothing special about my setup; my root partation (ext3) is hda5 (hd0,4) and i
install grub onto hda. i don't have a separate /boot partiion. i think this
needs to be reopened unless this has been fixed as well.

[Bart Grefte (bart-ravenslair)]

To Alvin Thompson and PeterShinners,

I've got the same problem as you guys.
But mine is somewhat weirder.
GRUB boots succesfully when the CF-card (where GRUB is in the MBR) is hooked up to a different computer...
On mine computer, there's a cursor flying across the screen (can't describe it better) followed by that smiley-like thing.

I know it's been a few years, but did you guys ever found a sollution?

ps. No clue what version of GRUB I've got, it's the one that comes with Damn Small Linux 4.4.10.