Re: grub update and reinstallation
On 8/1/20 11:09, Graham Seaman wrote:
> 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.
>
Or mine.
>
>>> 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.
My experience, now on eight machines, indicates that it should be if the
installed, configured, and used versions of grub components is
2.02+dfsg1-20+deb10u2.
I could be wrong, but here it has been the case for both UEFI (and root
on ZFS) and legacy boot setups, on both i386 and amd64. The only
exception is one root-on-ZFS VM that was slightly broken beforehand and
declines to boot for reasons I am fairly sure are unrelated to grub
installation.
Tom Dial
>
> 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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