Grub fails randomly....

[nukedathlonman]

Been a long while since I've been on here - shows how little problems I'm having.

Has anyone ever run into an issue with Grub getting corrupted during reboots or system power downs? It happens randomly to me on my Vostro - I get the starting grub message, and then the computer reboots....And does the same thing over and over and over.... So far the only remedy I have is to boot my live CD, then mount my Kubuntu partition, bind a few things to the mounted install (dev, sys, & proc), change root to my install, re-install grub manually, get out of the chroot, unmount everything, and reboot - works fine for a while after that, but anything from a few hours to a few weeks the same thing happens all over again.

[dibl]

Re: Grub fails randomly....

I'm going out on a limb and prognosticating "it's not Grub". Software does not behave like that, but hardware sometimes does. I'm not 100% certain, of course, that it is a hardware problem, but you need to look at things like:

- thermal -- could it be running at the edge of "too hot"? Does this happen when it is cold, or only when it is hot?

- hard drive performance -- it is a bit reminiscent of the old "slow spinup" problem, where an ageing hard drive is not up to speed when the bootloader makes its first attempt to read the MBR.

If the Grub installation were defective in some way, it would never fix itself, and you'd never boot.

[Qqmike]

Re: Grub fails randomly....

Agree with dibl.

[russlar]

Re: Grub fails randomly....

I've had this happen to me too. Completely random. I've found that an fsck clears it up most of the time, and a boot-to-cd-chroot-configure.grub fixes it the rest.

[nukedathlonman]

Re: Grub fails randomly....

I haven't ruled out a bug with in the SATA hardware.

The only thing I'm really pondering is maybe ME-II (Vista) is not getting along with Grub - it seems to happen the most when I used Windoze to play a game - I've got two games that won't work under Wine (otherwise I wouldn't have the OS at all).

Now that I think about it, booting and shutting down Kubuntu I can't recall seeing the problem. I'll have to get a journal going to track that more carefully - it happend tonight, and yep - I was rebooting from Windoze back into Kubuntu.

But I have ruled out it being a hardware issue - this notebook gets warm, but it's hardly the blast furnace my previous laptop was.

I've run fsck on my partitions and never found a problem - which is why I end up re-installing grub to the MBR (fixes it up nice and quick).

[Qqmike]

Re: Grub fails randomly....

I would do/have done a full test on the power supply. Or, if you have a known-good spare, trade it in and try it.

[grizzler]

Re: Grub fails randomly....

Has anyone ever run into an issue with Grub getting corrupted during reboots or system power downs?

YES! Reading that post brought back some memories! I had exactly the same thing happening with my dual boot (desktop) machine. Only in my case it wouldn't even get to the part where it showed any sort of message. It would just go on rebooting, over and over...

I repaired it a couple of times, just like you did, and finally gave up on Linux for a while (unfortunately I still need Windows sometimes...). Then I discovered Grub4dos (https://gna.org/projects/grub4dos/).
This can handle dual boot just as well as Linux Grub, but is usually run from the Windows side of the machine. It has all sorts of settings, some of which don't require any part of grub to be in the MBR (I had come to the conclusion this machine doesn't like a non windows boot record there...). I've been using this for months now, without any problems. Of course that doesn't mean it would help you as well, but it may be worth a try.

[nukedathlonman]

Re: Grub fails randomly....

I would do/have done a full test on the power supply. Or, if you have a known-good spare, trade it in and try it.

As I said, I've already ruled out a hardware bug. I don't have stability issues at all - running on my brick, off my battery, or running it off a borrowed brick the computer runs exactly the same - fast and stable.

I've been working on this for the last few days, and it is safe to say that this is a bug with Windoze Vista (ME-II) and grub as it occurs after I've either rebooted or shutdown ME-II. I can't get any consistency when it occurs - but it is very safe to say that this only happens when the computer is doing a warm or cold boot after running ME-II.

So technically, my best solution is to simply stop running Windoze... Unfortunately, all work and no play is not why I spec'd the laptop the way I did. More unfortunate is that Windoze is still a necessity for some games - so it must and will stay (for the time being).

Grub4dos looks interesting - if I can't get anywhere I'll try it next. For the time being I've decided to migrate over to Grub2. I'm still testing it out, but everything is looking good so far.

[Snowhog]

Re: Grub fails randomly....

I've been working on this for the last few days, and it is safe to say that this is a bug with Windoze Vista (ME-II) and grub as it occurs after I've either rebooted or shutdown ME-II. ...this only happens when the computer is doing a warm or cold boot after running ME-II.

I saw a similar behavior when I first attempted to venture into the Linux world on my (then) VAIO laptop running Windows 98SE. I was never able to get Linux to boot after I had boot into Windows first. I could, if I booted into Linux first, do a successful shutdown of Linux and return to the boot menu and start Windows. But going the other way always resulted in Linux not being able to restart. It would attempt, get only so far, and hang the PC.

There is a solution, which many here (me included) opted for -- Install VMWare Player (or VirtualBox) and install Windows as a VM. You get the best of both worlds.

[barbolani]

Re: Grub fails randomly....

After having some very bad experiences trying to make with Windows 2000 live together with other OSs on the same box, I adopted this rule that so far has steered me clear of any problems: Windows always wants to be in the primary boot partition. If not, each time you do any disk maintenance or admin operation (at leats in Windows 2000, XP and Vista are probably worse), it tries to "fix" it, something that achieves probably at the expense of being unable to boot any other partitions.

I thus always follow the rule, when installing Linux in a box that has to run also Windows, of creating an extended partition, creating a partition inside that extended partition and install Linux there. Having Grub installed in the boot sector of the hard drive is not bad by itself, you just have to remember that if you reinstall windows you'll have to boot with a CD or USB stick and reinstall Grub.

Of couse, the best solution if you can is to get rid of Windows completely. So far, I've only been able to do that on a few machines. The others, for one reason or another, have also to run Windows.