GRUB failure after update

[amckenzie]

So yesterday I grabbed an old laptop (a Dell Latitude D600) and installed Ubuntu 10.10 from the CD. Straight from the CD, it worked fine, including a reboot. I then ran an update, and now booting gives me the following message:



GNU GRUB version 1.98+20100804-5ubuntu3

Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For the first word,
TAB lists possible command completions.
Anywhere else TAB lists possible device or file completions.

grub>

I was able to get it to boot into ubuntu manually, and then things worked fine (at least until I rebooted, and had to go through the whole thing again). To get it to boot I used this:

set prefix=(hd0,1)/boot/grub
set root=(hd0,1)
insmod (hd0,1)/boot/grub/linux.mod
linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1 ro
initrd /initrd.img
boot

However, I discovered when I got into the system that /boot/grub/menu.lst didn't exist, and neither did /boot/grub/grub.cfg.

I don't care too much about that system -- it's got some other problems -- but my new laptop arrived this morning, and I'd like to make sure I'm not going to render the system unusable by installing Ubuntu. Can anyone point me to directions for reinstalling grub from scratch, or at least causing it to regenerate all those files and coming up with a config that works?

Thanks!

[sikander3786]

The updates somehow broke Grub, thats all I have to say at the moment. It shouldn't have broken Grub but don't know what happened there.

In order to figure out, we need to see the output of bootinfoscript as per instructions here.

http://bootinfoscript.sourceforge.net

menu.lst is not used by Grub2, it was a Grub-Legacy thing. But there should be a grub.cfg. Boot script will tell us.

And regarding you new system, I personally am running Ubuntu Lucid and Maverick on a total of 8 different PC and have no problems. They are updated till date and nothing is broken. I think you already know that ;-)

[amckenzie]

The updates somehow broke Grub, thats all I have to say at the moment. It shouldn't have broken Grub but don't know what happened there.

In order to figure out, we need to see the output of bootinfoscript as per instructions here.

http://bootinfoscript.sourceforge.net

menu.lst is not used by Grub2, it was a Grub-Legacy thing. But there should be a grub.cfg. Boot script will tell us.

And regarding you new system, I personally am running Ubuntu Lucid and Maverick on a total of 8 different PC and have no problems. They are updated till date and nothing is broken. I think you already know that ;-)


Great! I don't have the broken system with me at work, but I'll pull the bootinfo script when I can and add it. The main thing was that I wanted to make sure grub wasn't broken on EVERY machine that updated late last night... like I said, that system's got some problems anyway, and it's possible the hard drive just started failing or something. But it would suck to render my nice new laptop that hard to use.

[drs305]

You indicated that you don't have a /boot/grub/grub.cfg file. This can be generated by running "sudo update-grub". Since you said you can manually boot to your Ubuntu system this may be all you need to do.

Run the command and see if /boot/grub/grub.cfg now exists.


sudo update-grub
ls /boot/grub/grub.cfg

[amckenzie]

You indicated that you don't have a /boot/grub/grub.cfg file. This can be generated by running "sudo update-grub". Since you said you can manually boot to your Ubuntu system this may be all you need to do.

Run the command and see if /boot/grub/grub.cfg now exists.


sudo update-grub
ls /boot/grub/grub.cfg

I did try that, and it did create the grub.cfg file. After that, I had exactly the same problem -- dropped into the minimal grub shell, and had to boot manually.

[sikander3786]

I did try that, and it did create the grub.cfg file. After that, I had exactly the same problem -- dropped into the minimal grub shell, and had to boot manually.
bootinfoscript output will definitely help diagnose that :-)