[Bug 477430] Re: grub 2 error: out of disk. failed to boot default entries. press any key to continue...

[wb8nbs]

I just spent several days trying to install 10.04 NBR on a Thinkpad 770Z
(circa 1999).  The machine was running SuSE 10.3 and would not run the
Arduino IDE and refused to connect to my wireless AP with anything but
bare WEP.  I collected several hard drives so I could experiment while
not disturbing the 40 gig SuSE disk.  I tried Puppy and a couple
versions of Vector but the distro that worked best was Ubuntu 10.04
Netbook Remix.  I installed that from a magazine DVD on one of the spare
drives and got WPA2 and Arduino 1.0 working with not too much trouble.
I used xorg.conf from the SuSE 10.3 install to get 1280x1024 display.

Then started in on the 40G Fujitsu drive.  It had 6 partitions, win98,
swap, /, /usr, /boot and /home.  I kept win98 and /home but used the
installer gparted to merge /, /usr and /boot.  Drive would not boot
Grub said "out of disk" and dropped to rescue mode.  An ls showed the
correct partitions including (Hd0,5) which was where / was installed but
ls (hd0,5)/boot gave the "outof disk" message.  Read the release note
about cylinder alignment, then backed up /home and tried deleting all
the linux partitions and rebuilt them with gparted still leaving the
win98 alone.  "out of disk" error.  Backed up win98 files and deleted
and rebuilt ALL the partitions with gparted.  Still "out of disk" after
the install. I noted gparted, cfdisk and fdisk each gave different
reports when looking at the partitioning in each one of these steps.
What finally gave me a bootable disk was deleting all partitions and
rebuilding with good old fdisk.  I think I installed 10.04 NBR six times
during this (minimum one hour for an install).

I have a gadget to plug a second hard drive into the CDROM slot on this
laptop so in each of the iterations I was able to boot from the spare
disk,  mount the installed system partition on the 40 gig disk. and
examine the files.  In all cases I was able to access all information on
the non-booting drive.  Since grub2 consistently gave "out of disk" when
attempting to ls the boot directory after a failed start, I can only
conclude that this is a deficiency in grub.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/477430

Title:
  grub 2 error: out of disk. failed to boot default entries. press any
  key to continue...

Status in “grub2” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: grub2

  I recently updated one of my computers to Ubuntu 9.10 and I've been
  trying to upgrade the bootloader to grub 2. The computer is an Acer
  TravelMate 240 but the hard drive died some time ago so I've been
  booting off a USB harddrive, because the computer's BIOS doesn't
  support USB boot, I'm using the PLoP Bootmanager on CD
  (http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html) to chainload GRUB from the
  USB drive. GRUB legacy has been working fine like this for months.

  Now when I chainload GRUB 2 from GRUB legacy I get the following
  error:

  error: out of disk

      Failed to boot default entries.

  Press any key to continue...

  When I press a key the message just repeats. In order to boot and
  access the GRUB legacy menu, I have to do a CTRL+ALT+DEL. Please tell
  me if you need any more information to complete this bug report.

  ProblemType: Bug
  Architecture: i386
  Date: Sat Nov  7 15:08:55 2009
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
  Package: grub-pc 1.97~beta4-1ubuntu4
  ProcEnviron:
   LANG=en_US.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-14.48-generic
  SourcePackage: grub2
  Uname: Linux 2.6.31-14-generic i686

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