grub stall at boot since latest updates

[Saivann Carignan]

Binary package hint: grub2

I updated my karmic installation on August 1th and grub suddenly stopped to work. When I start my computer, grub only shows white text on black background : "GNU Grub version 1.96 [Minimal Bash-like line editing is supported..." and it stays there definitively and don't react to any keyboard key. That didn't give me any choices but to reset my computer and to install Grub 0.96 on a USB key to boot my computer.

Grub is installed on the MBR of my first hard disk on the first ext2 partitions, which is mounted in /root by karmic which is installed on a mdadm RAID-0 array.

When I rebooted for the first time, ubuntu detected a unclean shutdown for /dev/sda1 which is the grub /boot mount point. The computer has never been stopped incorrectly except at GRUB because it stalled so it's unsure if the ext2 filesystem was unclean before or after grub started to have problems.

Reinstalling grub with update-grub2 or from the recovery menu, Do a fsck on /dev/sda1, Reinstalling grub-pc or downgrading grub-pc to 1.96+20090611-1ubuntu3, changing /dev/sda1 to use ext3 instead of ext2 and updating /boot/grub/grub.cfg didn't change anything.

So I wonder if this has something to do with filesystem corruption as /boot/grub files does not seem to be replaced on update and because downgrading does not seem to have any effects.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sun Aug 9 15:53:34 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: grub-pc 1.96+20090725-1ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=fr_CA.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-5.24-generic
SourcePackage: grub2
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-5-generic x86_64

[Felix Zielcke (fzielcke)]

Am Sonntag, den 09.08.2009, 20:09 +0000 schrieb Saïvann Carignan:
>
> Reinstalling grub with update-grub2 or from the recovery menu, Do a fsck
> on /dev/sda1, Reinstalling grub-pc or downgrading grub-pc to
> 1.96+20090611-1ubuntu3, changing /dev/sda1 to use ext3 instead of ext2
> and updating /boot/grub/grub.cfg didn't change anything.
>
> So I wonder if this has something to do with filesystem corruption as
> /boot/grub files does not seem to be replaced on update and because
> downgrading does not seem to have any effects.
>

update-grub just generates grub.cfg. That's why upstream renamed it to grub-mkconfig.
grub-install takes care about all other files in /boot/grub

--
Felix Zielcke
Proud Debian Maintainer

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Using grub-install and/or grub-mkconfig does not fix the problem.. Unfortunately.

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

I re-installed my computer a few days ago with the karmic alpha 4 alternate CD and formatted both /boot and / during installation time and the installation went perfectly well, but the bug persist, with a fresh installation grub still refuses to boot ubuntu!

[dino99 (9d9)]

the last upgrades of grub2 config drop me now at startup with two lines of comments about "minimal bash-like line ..." before grub menu pop up 10 secondes later. During that time hdd are noisy: grub seem to search the kernels.
Then the countdown start & finally boot. Looking at logs, i can't find any warnings about that.

[ozhoo (colichia)]

I'm seeing my root filesystem spontaneously corrupted, then at the next reboot grub fails to detect the filesystem type. It drops me to the grub rescue> prompt and the system is useless until I use an install cd to run fsck. Seen with both ext3 and ext4

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

For the record, GRUB never writes to filesystems, so the filesystem
corruption must be happening somewhere else, I think.

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Marking the bug as "invalid" since I can't reproduce it anymore (grub takes a long time to boot the kernel on my desktop computer, but I can't reproduce any issues with the same configuration in virtualbox, as an example). Therefore not reproducible anymore.

[Walter R (riedelwalter)]

My problem of not restarting is with version 2.6.31-16
No problem restarting in version 2.6.31-14