[SOLVED] New 'error: the symbol 'grub_puts_' not found - on dual boot/vm

[b_s]

At one point this was working just fine - I presume some 10.04 update along the way broke things.

I have an Asus 1201n (03AHJ_Vuuln_cYE0xOa2UaTtzIrnbJOjRk9E0-eKWt6hMq8H6ZoXJzDJPffQsOIBV0Tw5rdQlfuVQ3xt7YFVDj5Z iCot5EWJE1LjIY96ODxeBKVZqhER3P8Ka3IgVyWVm2pA64i2gK Mh2I) with 8GB RAM (4 usable) dual booting win 7 and 10.04 LTS. Further, I have a vmware player 10.04 vm within Win 7 using these same (raw) disks. All was working fine. It still dual boots just fine, however, when I activate the vm, I get:

GRUB loading.
error: the symbol 'grub_puts_' not found
grub rescue>

The vm config for raw disks was generated by VirtualBox for me, and since vbox was too slow, tried vmware player (vbox will use/generate player compatible config files), and I've been happy ever since - until now.

I can boot the live cd and chroot to the installation (following http://www.webupd8.org/2010/05/fix-s...ound-when.html). grub.cfg is all but identical after running update-grub while chroot'ed. (It misses the win 7 partitions/loaders. Easily restored.)

Note: The vm software is intelligent enough to lock out all of the disk except /sda2 (swap) and /sda3 (boot/root), and although read-only, mbr (so 10.04 doesn't know, or care, it's a vm, or dual-booted, but it gets enough of mbr to skip to /sda3.)

I expect I was dual-booted to 10.04, ran updates one day, got on with my day. Some time, days or weeks later, while booted into Win 7, I noticed the vm would no longer boot. (So I certainly don't remember what updates happened to begin arriving at a culprit.)

Any suggestions as to how I go about rectifying this "error: the symbol 'grub_puts_' not found" so I can return to my regular usage patterns.

Or, for that matter, a short sequence of grub commands to be run every time I wish to start the vm?

Thanks.

[b_s]

Re: New 'error: the symbol 'grub_puts_' not found - on dual boot/vm

SOLVED.

Side Note - probably not relevant, but just in case:
- some time after this problem appeared, I used windows backup (win 7: control panel / backup and restore) to take an image off to an external usb drive (as win7 home premium irritatingly won't let you backup to the network, as ntbackup used to). It complained that the system drive was not active (/dev/sda3 was - Linux), so I activated it and proceeded with the backup.
- restoring the active (boot) drive to /dev/sda3 (using the LiveCD), did not change the problem of grub_puts.
- looking at the partition flags (at some point) both /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda3 were marked as bootable.
- sorting this out so only one drive was marked bootable also did not solve this problem.
- in case this matters, I'm listing it here.

A google search of 'grub rescue site:virtualbox.org' did not reveal an immediate solution (before I solved it).

My vmplayer is version 3.1.0 build-261024 - somewhere along the way, vmplayer gained the ability to create disk hardware.

Adding a 2nd disk (raw disk, specific partitions) matching what I expected to be currently using, and removing the 1st disk (which matched what I just added as far as I knew) let the vm boot.

Slight changes are observable in the resulting .vmdk file, but not by much.