Re: grub update and reinstallation
On 01/08/2020 14:00, Sven Joachim wrote:
> On 2020-08-01 12:23 +0100, Graham Seaman wrote:
>
>> On 01/08/2020 07:50, Tom Dial wrote:
>>> I have a laptop that became unbootable because
>>> the initial loader failed to find a symbol (grub_calloc) and balked.
>>> Like the one mentioned here, it uses legacy boot. One explanation has it
>>> that this happened because the MBR and the remainder of grub were not
>>> both updated or were updated with slightly incompatible data.
>>>
>>> One fix appears to be to reinstall grub using a rescue CD or another
>>> system. That worked for me.
>>
>> My home server sits in my loft managing comms with the outside world;
>> yesterday it overheated (not a surprise) and went down.
>
> You should probably open the machine up and clean it. :-)
The outdoor temperature was 38 centigrade; in my loft it was
considerably more. The machine is spotless :-)
>
>> On reboot
>> after cooling it came back up with the grub_calloc problem, so like
>> Tom I reinstalled after which it appears to be OK.
>>
>> BUT because I have no idea why the original problem occurred, or why a
>> reinstall fixed the problem, I have no idea if this is a permanent
>> fix, or if I have a system which is liable to fail to reboot again in
>> the future. Does anyone know? It's a very simple single drive system
>> with legacy boot.
>
> In this case the error is quite unlikely to occur, I have no idea why it
> happened for you in the first place.
>
It has happened to quite a range of users in the last week (search for
'grub calloc') - users running ubuntu, lubuntu, debian-mint, vanilla
debian, that I've seen. So I assume its some upstream problem with grub.
Some people seem to think the problem only shows on multi-boot-disk or
raid systems, but that didn't apply in my case.
>> I run it with security updates on auto, and check
>> for other updates manually once a week or so. Should I change this
>> pattern for a while while possible grub problems are sorted upstream?
>
> I would recommend to run "dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc". This should bring
> up three dialogues, the last of which asks for the disk(s) to install grub
> on. On your system this is most likely /dev/sda.
>
I already reinstalled grub-pc (using a rescue-usb) , that's how I got
the system booting again. But I don't know if the current grub is
trustable or not.
Graham
> Or get the device name from the debconf database:
>
> readlink -f $(debconf-show grub-pc 2>/dev/null | grep grub-pc/install_devices: | cut -d ':' -f2)
>
> Cheers,
> Sven
>
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