GRUB GRUB black screen
One of my operating systems (a version of Debian Squeeze) is now
refusing to boot. It just shows a black screen with the 2 words GRUB
GRUB in the top left hand corner. I wonder if anyone has seen this
sort of behaviour before?
More background: I have multiple operating systems on my PC which can
be selected by means of a boot manager (BootitNG), including 3
versions of Debian Squeeze, Linux Mint and Windows 7. The boot manager
resides in the master boot record and when I select an OS to run it
sets up the master boot record for the selected OS, then passes
control to Grub located in the root partition. This has been working
without problem for some months (years in the case of Debian Lenny,
with the original Grub).
At first I suspected a hardware fault, but the other Debian works ok.
In fact all the other OS's do, with one exception - Kubuntu. In fact I
had just installed Kubuntu 64 bit so I suspect its possible this had
something to do with the problem. Kubuntu ran ok on its first bootup
but now on trying to boot into it for a second time it boots but
doesn't complete booting. (I only installed it out of curiosity and I
have now deleted it from the system)
However the problem is strange. My boot manager is also able to take
an image of a partition and I restored the image of the failed Debian
Squeeze system from a known good copy, but to no avail.
I use a common swap partition for all my Linuxes, and I have 3 other
partitions (2 drives) for data which all OS's have access to. Each
Linux has its own additional tmp partition. I wondered about some
issue with the common swap partition but my other 3 Linuxes (two
Debian one Mint) are using it with no problem.
I wondered whether Kubuntu has somehow altered some BIOS setting but I
can't see any changes - also the other Debian isn't affected. Or maybe
it has subtly changed something which GRUB uses to identify the UUIDs.
Any ideas would be very welcome.
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