12.04 upgrade crashed at update-grub

[ChrisAnstey]

During my upgrade from 11.10 (about 3 wks old) to 12.04, it appears to have an issue while running 'update-grub'. The upgrade (through GUI) was all going through fine, until it appeared to hang. Looking at the terminal output, it said something about update-grub, listed a few boot options ('kernel 3.0..., 'kernel 3.2...'), then stops at the memtest entry.

Looking in /boot/grub, there was a grub.cfg.new, that looked about half done - last modified about the time it stalled.

Looking at top, 'update-grub' is just using all of one of my cores, and did so for 20 mins or so. Then I killed it, the upgrade appeared to carry on, then a few mins later, the same thing happened. And I've been round the same cycle again.

Any suggestions on what the issue could be?

Chris

[oldfred]

Welcome to the forums.

Did you make any customizations to 40_custom, the scripts or /etc/default/grub? Or maybe the grub update/install is not complete.

The new versions of grub do not like typos. I had an old typo since grub2 in my 40_custom that all it did before was just not show a boot stanza that I guess I never used as I did not notice it was not there. With grub 1.99 it would only write the grub.cfg.new with error messages.

You may have to chroot into your install from a liveCD and totally reinstall grub2 (grub-pc).

You would not have to uninstall grub or grub legacy.

drs305 chroot to purge & reinstall grub2
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1581099

[ChrisAnstey]

Hi - thanks!

No, I haven't made any modifications to grub settings anywhere. The install is on my work computer, so hopefully it'll come out of suspend tomorrow, and I'll check the grub install is ok.