Bug 17098

Summary: Grub Rescue black screen on boot.
Product: Mageia Reporter: Jude Ashvin Lobo Shenoy <ashvinlobo>
Component: Release (media or process)Assignee: Mageia Bug Squad <bugsquad>
Status: RESOLVED INVALID QA Contact:
Severity: major    
Priority: Normal CC: sysadmin-bugs, zen25000
Version: 5   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: x86_64   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Source RPM: CVE:
Status comment:

Description Jude Ashvin Lobo Shenoy 2015-11-07 04:09:06 CET
Am using M5 on my pc and from the time i updated grub around the 23rd of October since there was a grub update released, i get a grub rescue screen on bootup so when i alt+ctrl+del for a restart i get the M5 grub menu. 

This happens regularly and i tried all the options on my motherboard the problem persists. It goes away only when i restart the bootup process.

There are times when i select Mageia from the boot menu and i get the message to press enter as the disk was not found. I tried digging up why this happens and have concluded that the problem is with Mageia grub 2. I use grub2 and i feel the problem lies there. I also reset my motherboard to check out if this solves the issue but it still stays. Sorry i have no screen shot.
Comment 1 Barry Jackson 2015-11-11 15:46:50 CET
Strange.

1. Is this a legacy BIOS system or UEFI?

2. Did you check your root filesystem recently for errors?
You could do this from a LIVE CD or USB stick and as root run e2fsck /dev/sdXY (setting XY to match the drive/partition of your system root.

To do a full check using safe read/write bad block testing you could use e2fsck -fccky /dev/sdXY however this will take a long time on a large partition.
NOTE: the partition under test must NOT be mounted (hence the need for a LIVE CD or a second system on another drive).

If this is NOT a UEFI system then you could try making a backup boot CD/DVD/USB using the script here, to see if the problem persists when booting from the backup grub2 it creates on the removable media. That may give us a clue.
https://wiki.mageia.org/en/User:Barjac

CC: (none) => zen25000
Whiteboard: (none) => NEEDINFO

Comment 2 Jude Ashvin Lobo Shenoy 2015-11-12 13:05:02 CET
Hi Barry.....It's a UEFI system so will have to try the diagnosis as above. Will report back soon with the results. Thanks.
Comment 3 Barry Jackson 2015-11-12 15:43:28 CET
So there are there two issues:

1. Grub rescue screen and no menu.

2. Menu appears but boot fails with disk not found when selecting Mageia.

This really does sound like hardware, as during early boot things should not happen randomly. The sequence of events are pretty much set in stone and the processes, disk and memory usage should be exactly the same each time.

You could also try running memtest which is available from the grub2 menu and leave it running overnight.

You could also check the hard drive using smartctl which may indicate an abnormal instance of read fails (which in the early stages of failure would be masked from the user).

su
urpmi smartmontools
smartctl -a /dev/sda

#---------------------------

man smartctl for full details
Comment 4 Jude Ashvin Lobo Shenoy 2015-11-13 04:30:44 CET
Hi Barry.....i get the following when i boot up using suse boot manager-
error - no such device
error - no such partition
error - you have to load the kernel first
Then i do alt ctl del and i select mageia 5 from the boot menu and am on the login screen in a minute.
Seems strange. I did a smart test on the hdd and i shows as healthy. I feel a re-install is required....Ash
Comment 5 Barry Jackson 2015-11-14 13:44:44 CET
Ah - where did SuSE come from?
Did you try running: 
grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
from within SuSE (assuming that you can boot it from Mageia' grub2)?
Comment 6 Jude Ashvin Lobo Shenoy 2015-11-14 16:15:46 CET
Hi Barry....Actually i have suse on my pc on a separate hdd so i did use it to boot mageia. Actually i did a fresh install and all is well now. It seems the problem was that there was some residue from my previous fedora installation on the same drive on which mageia resides. This residue was showing up in the boot menu on the bios but in reality there was no fedora. Once i reinstalled mageia all is clean now. Mageia is on a separate hdd like Suse so 2 hdd on my system....Ash
Comment 7 Barry Jackson 2015-11-14 23:33:06 CET
OK, good to know that you resolved it.

Closing then,

Status: NEW => RESOLVED
Resolution: (none) => INVALID
Whiteboard: NEEDINFO => (none)